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I’d rather make someone else do it by offering things in trade. Almost like some kind of barter system. I’ll fix your garden tools and equipment just feed me plz.
we’ve got plenty of rich to eat
It’s a little late to start a food garden. You won’t be getting any harvests for a while, and it won’t be much. Best to stock up on shelf-stable goods now, and build community for mutual aid.
It’s spring in most of the northern hemisphere and therefore the next months are the best time to start a garden. Yes, chances are that you won’t feed your family from it. But it’s fun, it is a great way to get fresh food and if you have the option to do it, you should
Oh, yeah. Gardening is lovely, just don’t expect to be able to feed yourself (or anyone else) in the immediate future by planting some tomatoes by your kitchen window, starting now. It would be a while before you could harvest, and it would be a very small yield, assuming you get a good healthy crop. A lot of people act like the average Joe or Jane could feed their household and neighbors with minimal effort and a few square feet of free space by their window, when that’s just not realistic - at least, not for most people.
It totally depends on your living and garden conditions. If you have the space and the current climate for it you can totally use your garden to save money on groceries. This will not feed your whole household but can help to save some money and make everything more resilient. Plant an apple tree and you will maybe not have apples this year, but in the next year you can get your first apples. My tree is now 4 years old and is growing several kilos of apples every year and will for the next decades. Plant a cherry tree. Raspberries. Redcurrant. Other fruit trees. Those plants will grow every year and provide you with a lot of healthy food and will not take that much time to grow and cultivate. So it is a great time to start - you might get some results later this year, but next year will be great.
All I have is tomatoes…guess that will have to do.
By design by those who refuse to escape their mysanthropic anthrocidal circular reasoning.
I read the title in the same voice as youtube’s “That’s how the law works.”
Who wants a kitchen garden?
Who wants to care for a kitchen garden? It’s not as simple as putting seeds into the ground and waiting until it grows. You have to dig up the site. You have to water it in a drought. You have to pull out the weed. You might even have to fight against insects, or use fertilizer. 19 out of 20 people I knew had given up on the idea of a kitchen garden.
Then there’s me who has a black hand. Damned near every plant I’ve intentionally tried to grow has died, including the sturdy ones.
I am a successful gardener.
You can’t and don’t want to eat 20lbs of tomato in a week. I use maybe 2-4lbs and the rest of it rots or has to be given away. I’m lucky if consume 1/4 of what I produce.
And that’s how crops come in, all at the same time in abundance. It’s not like you can pick 4 tomatoes each day and they just hang out for weeks on the vine. There is about a 4-6 week widow in which all the stuff you have spent 5 months growing, is edible off the vine. You start in April and then you don’t really get anything until August, and then by Mid Sept, the plants stop producing and are dead by Oct.
And if you want to preserve it, that’s a lot more work and you need the space and equipment to store dozens and dozens of jarred/canned veg. And at that point it’s no longer a small kitchen garden.
oh and by the way if you give me that ‘community sharing!’ stuff. no. literally everyone’s crops are also coming in at the same time. that’s why you see people leaving baskets of veg on the stops all around and nobody takes it, because they already have their own from their own gardens.
That is very different from a commercial farm who is able to have dozens of rotating crops and crop varieties with the expertise to manage it and also the ability to distribute it commercially.
Also, groundhogs will fuck up your garden, and they dig tunnels and climb fences. You have to basically build a big cage around your garden, floor included.
one of my friend has a pretty elaborate garden setup.
he has a groundhog execution chamber too. he has to gas and kill about 6 of them each year.
I box trap them (they love cantaloupes) and haul them off to a neighboring town. I’m not sure how humane it is since they usually tear off their claws trying to get out of the trap. And momma hog is too smart to go in the trap, so I only get the kids.
Not my garden :) groundhogs don’t exist here
grains and pulses
What are pulses?
lentils and their friends
Is this a good time to mention that animal ag is the most wasteful form of food we have? Further, consider capitalism and western rich countries. If the choice is between feedin poor people and feeding cows, what choice will the money make?
I dunno, we grow huge amounts of corn for ethanol to replace 15% of the fuel for cars… And it would be multiple times more efficient (in terms of land use) to cover that area with solar panels and phase out ICEs for EVs.
Good thing I have a couple of acquaintances that have small farms and produce, so if shit goes downhill, I know where to offer my labor
They’ll have plenty of friends and family that suddenly feel an urge to come over and lend them a hand once the real shit goes down
Plant a vegetable garden?WHERE?
DO YOU THINK I CAN AFFORD A YARD?
Container garden. I even had one on my North facing balcony in Baltimore.
Hydroponic indoor gardening is the way. (I assume - I don’t grow any food hahahahaha)
If they cannot afford a yard what makes you think they have space to spare inside to grow stuff??
Was thinking of those small footprint plant towers that were circulating online a decade or so ago. Look like big upright pipes with holes in the sides for plants. Continually circulating water inside. I’m sure they’re expensive now but I bet we could throw one together without too much effort if we had the knowledge.
i would, but power prices are making it impossible to be a alternative
Do you think power draw would be that much for hydroponic/aquaponic? Always just watched that and auto gardening from afar
it kinda dosent matter if its hydroponic or soil they still need the same amount of light, and that depends on the crop, but basically there isnt a crop that could feed you if u only have a normal sized flat, even if u stack micro greens to the top and sleep in the bathtub
I have a copy of this little pamphlet called Fugitive Gardens, which is all about gardening in small spaces, such as a fire escape.
It’s all fun and games until there’s a fire.
Most chemical fertilizer is synthesised from LNG.
The two biggest exporters are Russia (sanctioned) and Qatar (all plants shut down)
Good thing my country exports 90% of its agricultural produce, so if we start getting hungry then we’ll just export a bit less.
(We learned the hard way a long time ago when we ran out of potatoes.)
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
Don’t assume your food won’t continue to be sold overseas if the growers/wholesalers can make more money that way.
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
*Britian was exporting food from Ireland during the famine.
Regardless of nationality, don’t expect your billionaire overlord to have ethics if it comes at the cost of a 0.7% income loss
What billionaire overlord? Irish agriculture is made up of over 100,000 independant family farms, and each farmers income is on average about €40-50k.
We produce enough beef to support almost 3x the population and enough dairy for 10x the population.
Ireland is the 2nd most food secure country in the world.
That sounds impressive, I never heard about it. Do you have some resource about it? I don’t know how to search for it and Google is, like, you know
Sure:
Sustainable Food Systems Ireland
- However, Ireland continues to be the largest net exporter of Beef in the Northern Hemisphere
- There are approximately 137,500 family farms in Ireland with an average size of 32.4 hectares per holding according to the Farm Structure Survey of 2016.
The report, highlights that average farm income is forecast to reach €48,500 in 2025
The scale of our farming output relative to our domestic population of 4.9m people mean that Ireland exports some 90% of its net beef output, making Ireland the largest beef exporter in Europe and one of the largest in the world (Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine, 2019). Similarly, 85% of dairy output is exported.
This isn’t exactly what I was searching for, I was more interested in the “independant farms” part
In France, most “family ran” farms work on rented land and under an exclusivity contract that forces them to sell all their production to a single company. This leads to a situation where the few billionaires that buy food from everyone get to set the prices at which they buy different crops (and therefore what the farmers produce), and whether to export it. In other news, France is exporting wine while malnutrition rises and the major food charity is running out of fund as the demand increases. The government has stepped in to fund the charity, but still, we end up prioritizing exporting alcohol over feeding locals.
I would be more interested in how the system decides what is exported and produced, rather than in what is currently exported and produced
No, you have to expect your government to do that, which is why almost the entire world is not hyper capitalist choochoo trains
I mean, you exported 90% of your agricultural produce back then, too.
Damn, imagine if we hadn’t depleted our soils of nutrients through unsustainable agricultural practices requiring us to pump unsustainable chemical fertilisers into the ground.
Combined with reducing the half a years supply of food per person that we waste per person each year. And using local native species instead of unsuitable foreign crops, we wouldn’t have to worry about any of that right now.
Oh well, now millions of the global south get to starve to death as we
stealpurchase their dwindling crops. Modern society is the best thing ever and we should make no effort to change it.Damn, imagine if we hadn’t depleted our soils of nutrients through unsustainable agricultural practices requiring us to pump unsustainable chemical fertilisers into the ground.
Don’t forget about poisoning our aquifers with fracking.
without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer there’s only enough reactive nitrogen going around for something like 1-1.5B people. yea mate very sustainable to retvrn to traditional farming and starve 80% of the planet in the process
How, with the 3-field rotation method from the middle ages? It was super sustainable but we’d need 3x more farmland
Ehh… We kinda missed the boat on that by like a hundred years. Even before the Haber process allowed us to allocate ammonia chemically, we had started to worse and worse famine pop up globally. We just have more people on earth than the natural nitrogen cycle can support through agricultural means.
No, we don’t
Piss in a bucket. There’s your ammonia.
And Zack Galifianakis is doing an agrarian tv show promoting doing your own farming, wise comedian
