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A new kind of “Victory Garden”
Posted By katie allison granju
Are rising gas and food prices leading you to reconsider where and how you get your own food?
At a party this weekend I spoke to a woman who has started doing the same thing, on a small scale, but she has ambitions for creating a much larger garden next year. We discussed the rising cost of food and how it is unlikely to abate with the increasing demands of a petroleum-based economy that is running ever drier as global demand increases exponentially to critical levels, affecting the cost of food production in particular. It isn’t going to get better, not for a long time.
I’ve heard of other people taking up gardening as more than just a hobby, with a goal beyond merely producing enough homegrown tomatoes for summer treats. People I wouldn’t have thought particularly green-thumbed are getting serious about learning how to produce enough vegetables to sustain them through the fall and winter, how to can and preserve. And for the first time in my life, I’m interested in it. I won’t be able to garden on a grand scale this year, but friends are planning to rent land next year to form a cooperative garden.
Apart for the economic incentives, there just seems to be something more spiritually wholesome about dropping the habit of buying bell peppers shipped from half way around the world, or settling for dull, listless strawberries dyed red after being picked unripened. And why not have good tomatoes year-round, the kind that burst with flavor only provided by a carefully tended garden? We used to can them every year when I was growing up. My grandparents always grew tomatoes, green beans, and corn, three staples always found lining their shelves in mason jars. We never had to buy that stuff growing up.
I’m not a half-bad baker, and bread-making as a daily enterprise is another thing I could get into. I’m pretty much over the loaves of spongy bread found in grocery stores that have about as much taste as their plastic wrapping. I could go on, I guess, but, OK, I’ll draw the line at raising chickens.
Seriously, the world is changing fast, and forcing changes in our individual lives many of us never expected. Waste is catching up with us, in other words, and it’s time to slow down, smarten up, and learn something.
May 12th, 2008
