Gardening Industry Sees Boom as Families Grow Their Own Veggies to Save on Groceries
March 16th, 2009Path to Freedom is soooo good. Here’s the Journal, in case you get lost in all of the quality information on the main site.
The Dervaes family was my inspiration to learn how to garden. They have taken urban homesteading to unthinkable levels; certainly beyond what might have been thought of as “maximum” even a few years ago.
If you aren’t currently doing anything along these lines, don’t look at what they have done and think, “How will I ever achieve that?” The point is to look at what’s possible, take inspiration and then do… Something.
Food is the gateway through which clarity on many other issue areas can flow. Once people understand how they’re being shaken down with regard to food, lots of other topics come into view. Energy, alternative health, deep politics, money/debt on and on.
Masses of people deciding to produce even a small amount of their own food has got to be the ultimate pants shitting event for the elite. Small scale food production is a very dangerous path. It can lead to a near wholesale rejection of the programming that makes the status quo horror show possible. It’s inevitable that people who never thought that it would come to “this” are going to start bartering, trading and selling food to each other, despite what the Legion of Doom has in mind. If the government is actually stupid enough to try to stop this under the auspices of food safety… I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.
For anyone who’s thinking about producing food, here are just a few books to consider.
I went from knowing nothing about gardening to growing an outstanding garden on my first attempt by reading this book:
Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Use Bill Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture to get ideas about designing systems and using your space effectively.
Slightly larger scale? Craving more detail on nutrients and crop rotation? The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener by Eliot Coleman is excellent.
Shit is very helpful in gardens and there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use your own.
The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph C. Jenkins
Here’s a free, older edition online.
Well, there are a couple of reasons why you might not want to.
From experience, I can tell you that most people aren’t mentally ready to deal with shit related issues, especially their own shit related issues. You would almost certainly want to keep this to yourself. *chuckle* Also, doing what this book describes could get you in a lot of trouble in many locked down suburbs and urban areas.
The fact is that properly composted human waste makes an excellent, perfectly safe soil amendment. If you’re not in a position to afford to haul in external inputs for your garden, this is a good way to feed your soil and your plants. The water that’s not being flushed can be used on your garden.
I ran an outlaw shit bucket cartage based composting toilet in a suburban setting in California and managed to get away with it. There’s about a one minute window from the time that you dump your bucket onto the pile to the time you get it covered with “biofilter” (sawdust, leaves, dried grass clippings, etc.) where the smell has the potential to give you away. I could tell you that it doesn’t smell once the biofilter has been applied, but you wouldn’t believe me. Seriously, it doesn’t smell.
My pile was at the base of a large coral tree, and let’s just say that the coral tree was doing better than ever and none of the neighbors had any idea what was going on.
Humanure may be further than you’re willing to go while the system is still somewhat functional, but I’d strongly recommend learning about composting human waste for gardening purposes, just in case.
Finally the authors of A Nation of Farmers sent me a pre-publication copy of the book to read. I’m about half way through it.
Now, the people in the Associated Press story below are growing their own food to save money. The end. That’s good enough for me, and that’s probably the most compelling reason for why the average person would grow their own food.
My wife and I cite that reason and many others for why we do what we do (see: Farmlet). But A Nation of Farmers is a book length treatment on why millions of us should become “farmers.” It would be stupid of me to try to sum it up in a few sentences, but if you’re looking for an all encompassing philosophical treatment on why you should be growing at least some of your own food, this is it.
I got over the urge to take the book apart every time I found a problem/disagreement/fallacy. I set my red pencil down and just went for it. In general, they’re right, and their message is worth spreading around.
While I’ve only read half of it, the reason I’m mentioning it here is because it’s right on target in terms of what’s happening in the story below.
Maybe Sharon and Aaron will get their Nation of Farmers after all.
Via: AP:
With the recession in full swing, many Americans are returning to their roots — literally — cultivating vegetables in their backyards to squeeze every penny out of their food budget.
Industry surveys show double-digit growth in the number of home gardeners this year and mail-order companies report such a tremendous demand that some have run out of seeds for basic vegetables such as onions, tomatoes and peppers.
“People’s home grocery budget got absolutely shredded and now we’ve seen just this dramatic increase in the demand for our vegetable seeds. We’re selling out,” said George Ball, CEO of Burpee Seeds, the largest mail-order seed company in the U.S. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Gardening advocates, who have long struggled to get America grubby, have dubbed the newly planted tracts “recession gardens” and hope to shape the interest into a movement similar to the victory gardens of World War II.
Those gardens, modeled after a White House patch planted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943, were intended to inspire self-sufficiency, and at their peak supplied 40 percent of the nation’s fresh produce, said Roger Doiron, founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International.
Doiron and several colleagues are petitioning President Obama to plant a similar garden at the White House as part of his call for a responsible, eco-friendly economic turnaround. Proponents have collected 75,000 signatures on an online petition.
“It’s really part of our history and it’s part of the White House’s history,” Doiron said. “When I found out why it had been done over the course of history and I looked at where we are now, it makes sense again.”
But for many Americans, the appeal of backyard gardening isn’t in its history — it’s in the savings.
The National Gardening Association estimates that a well-maintained vegetable garden yields a $500 average return per year. A study by Burpee Seeds claims that $50 spent on gardening supplies can multiply into $1,250 worth of produce annually.
Doiron spent nine months weighing and recording each vegetable he pulled from his 1,600-square-foot garden outside Portland, Maine. After counting the final winter leaves of Belgian endive, he found he had saved about $2,150 by growing produce for his family of five instead of buying it.
Adriana Martinez, an accountant who reduced her grocery bill to $40 a week by gardening, said there’s peace of mind in knowing where her food comes from. And she said the effort has fostered a sense of community through a neighborhood veggie co-op.
“We’re helping to feed each other and what better time than now?” Martinez said.
A new report by the National Gardening Association predicts a 19 percent increase in home gardening in 2009, based on spring seed sales data and a telephone survey. One-fifth of respondents said they planned to start a food garden this year and more than half said they already were gardening to save on groceries.
Community gardens nationwide are also seeing a surge of interest. The waiting list at the 312-plot Long Beach Community Garden has nearly quadrupled — and no one is leaving, said Lonnie Brundage, who runs the garden’s membership list.
“They’re growing for themselves, but you figure if they can use our community garden year-round they can save $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 a year,” she said. “It doesn’t take a lot for it to add up.”
Seed companies say this renaissance has rescued their vegetable business after years of drooping sales. Orders for vegetable seeds have skyrocketed, while orders for ornamental flowers are flat or down, said Richard Chamberlin, president of Harris Seeds in Rochester, N.Y.
Business there has increased 40 percent in the last year, with the most growth among vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes and kitchen herbs that can thrive in small urban plots or patio containers, he said. Harris Seeds recently had to reorder pepper and tomato seeds.
“I think if things were fine, you wouldn’t see people doing this. They’re just too busy,” Chamberlin said. “Gardening for most Americans was a dirty word because it meant work and nobody wanted more work — but that’s changed.”
Harris Seed’s Web site now gets 40,000 hits a day.
Among larger companies, Burpee saw a 20 percent spike in sales in the last year and started marketing a kit for first-time gardeners called “The Money Garden.” It has sold 15,000 in about two months, said Ball.
A Web-based retailer called MasterGardening.com is selling similar packages, and Park Seed of Greenwood, S.C., is marketing a “Garden for Victory Seed Collection.” Slogan: “Win the war in your own backyard against high supermarket prices and nonlocal produce!”
Cultivators with years of experience worry that home gardeners lured by promises of big savings will burn out when they see the amount of labor required to get dollars from their dirt. The average gardener spends nearly five hours a week grubbing in the dirt and often contends with failure early on, said Bruce Butterfield, a spokesman for The National Gardening Association.
“The one thing you don’t factor into it is the cost of your time and your labor,” he said.
“But even if it’s just a couple of tomato plants in a pot, that’s worth the price of admission.”
Fantastic piece Kevin, especially the book references which I will probably purchase for my growing library (no pun intended). I’ve been growing a good portion of my own food for over 3 years now, and it’s a big part of my daily life now and such an incredibly rewarding experience on so many levels. I can’t recommend this enough. And yes, you are spot on about Path to Freedom. I’m nowhere near that level of production, but they serve as a major inspiration for what can be achieved in a small space.
Just ordered some of the books, and ran across another that seems worthwhile too — “Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants” — http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0966678311 — although I haven’t read it, but it sounds logical and certainly somewhat more appealing than humanure (although I do think that’s smart to learn about, just in case).
I also STRONGLY recommend Edible Forest Gardens http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Forest-Gardens-2-set/dp/1890132608/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237295916&sr=8-1 for it’s focus on using PERENNIALS. We need to reverse our trend of turning forests into grasslands into deserts. Also, Mycelium Running http://www.amazon.com/Mycelium-Running-Mushrooms-Help-World/dp/1580085792/ref=pd_sim_b_2
Although not a book, learn about biochar to repair soils and offset our own carbon release. http://delicious.com/b0z0mind/biochar The BBC also did a fantastic program on biochar called “The Secret of El Dorado” Should be able to find it on your favorite tracker.