Sustainable Living

They are just springing up everywhere, the little Victory Garden now renamed by most people the Freedom Garden. From the White House to lovely backyards. But is it enough? A little vegetable garden will certainly help Americans get back to eating healthy and help everyone world wide lift some of the burden that is the food demand. But can a good tasty salad, some beans, peas and corn be enough?

Some say not.

There are many folks looking for alternative ways to sustain themselves without having to move out of their urban setting and more now than ever, they are looking not only for the garden, but for the meat supply. To know what is in it, what it was fed, how it was treated are becoming very important to folks these days. This is inevitably a follow up to such stories concerning antibiotics, hormonal treatments and lousy husbandry that has been drifting in and out of the news for the past several years.

A list of things to consider for urban and non-urban settings alike:

Chickens (urban and non-urban)
Quail (urban and non-urban)
Rabbit (urban and non-urban)
Goats (urban and non-urban)
Bees (non-urban and in specific circumstances urban)
Shrimp (urban and non-urban)
Fish (urban and non-urban)

When I say urban, I don't mean the 10 acres sitting on the edge of town, I'm talking about sub-divisions and residential areas that have small plots of land. Yes, you can have acreage in town, I know because I lived on 3 in Knoxville. But not everyone will have this land readily available. Hence bees being in specific circumstances. I don't think it would fly too well if someone in a 75 house subdivision with lot sizes of 10 by 40 for a back yard decided to start up a bee hive. Definitely not.

There are laws to consider. Licenses in some states, cities, counties. Neighbors to annoy. But once all that is worked out and you have decided what it is you can do, what is stopping you?

And it isn't just meat anymore:

Cheese
Yogurt and other dairy staples
Grain growing and milling
Cosmetics
Candles
Mead and alcohol and here
Vinegar
Orchards

It doesn't really stop there either. Homemade wind generators and solar power are also becoming more popular due to the high costs associated with buying packages and having them professionally installed. And for those lucky enough to be near water, there is water generation to consider.

So depending on what you can do will depend on how many other things you can accomplish. For example: If you keep bees you have honey to make mead, you can potentially make vinegar from the alcohol from the mead, you can make candles from the wax, cosmetics from the wax and honey and have honey to use as a sweetener in lieu of sugar. The bees will in turn pollinate your vegetable and grain crops and orchard. Grains, vegetables and fruits mean food for you, food for beef, chicken, pork, game. Meat from any of these, eggs from chickens and quail, dairy from the cows and goats. You can see where all this is going.

A nice little package that is, no? While it does cost upfront to get started in land (providing you aren't paying for it already), supplies and labor, it pays off in the future. Once established, its maintained, and less work is involved. Less work, not no work but still less work all around. There are many testaments to this. Blogs are numerous that show examples of this type of urban sustainable living. Some of them are a little outside of town, some are smack dab in the middle.

One thing I learned growing up is the ability for a community to trade. Ok, so you can't have bees on your back 40 and you can have noisy chickens and there is just not enough room for goats. Gotcha. That doesn't stop you from making friends with a local bee keeper or farmer. Trade is good. Farmers markets are a priceless resource for such things. I was part of a small farmers market in Knoxville selling homemade soaps. I traded for potted herbs, fresh baked breads, other homemade soaps, fresh vegetables, locally produced honey, locally made salsas, jelly, jam, preserves. I still have contact with some of these folks, even if I don't get to make the homemade soap for the market anymore and I get discounts from these people for trading with them in the past for their locally produced wares and when I have something to trade, they know about it.

It didn't cost me anything but my own initiative, sweat, and time. I was already at the market for my own reasons, building the network was a bonus. Everything depends on how much time you want to put into this sort of life. It is a life style change. I dare say that once you start eating french fries from your own potatoes, it would be difficult to go back to fast food. There is nothing in the world like fresh beef.

Growing up, I moved from small town to big city and the transition was difficult. Everything tasted like plastic, fresh foods didn't seem to have the same textures, colors, flavors or even aromas that I knew. My husband is the grandson of a butcher so when we decided to buy a side of beef, the savings were a huge factor, but afterwards, we wouldn't have cared if we'd paid thousands of dollars. There is just no contest.

How to get established:

First, give up on the idea of perfect looking vegetables. You want uniformed vegetables, go to the grocery store. They throw out enough odd looking food because it isn't desirable. Your garden is not a commercial grower. Your garden is a place of out of the norm shades of the rainbow, of dimpled tomatoes, crooked potatoes, pointy ears of corn. Food is misshaped, so what? You're likely to be cutting it into chunks and tossing it into something anyway, what does it matter what its exact shape was when it came out of the garden?

Second, mother nature giveth and she also taketh away. You will have losses. There will be bad years. There are going to be times where you seems as if nothing you've done amounts to a hill of beans. Literally. But this happens. Blight wiped out the American Chestnut trees to almost near extinction. The chestnuts we see now are Asian. Disease is threatening the main type of banana you see at the store today, we'll switch to another kind that is resistant to the disease. Disease is threatening our citrus, again, we'll stitch to a disease resistant kind. Large scale, these things are utterly devastating, it is a economic disturbance, etc. In the home garden, it means you get to find another tasty variety to grow that is resistant to whatever happens to be plaguing you. Do not see it as failure. See it as a learning experience that enables you to try something new that will dazzle the family, neighbors and friends at the dinner table.

You start small. In my mind there are musts. Rain barrels. Compost. Good soil. Start there and then work into the garden. A lot of beginners make the mistake of jumping in both feet and then are unable to continue when several disasters hit in rapid succession or all at once. The small ecosystem that is being established takes time. I was reading on one of the forums I enjoy and a new gardener was just freaking out. She'd started her garden that year, she had numerous plantings and had no experience with any of them. She was over run by pests and disease and she was losing heart. It is difficult to establish a proper area all at once. Start with a few items you wish to grow first - after you can maintain them with your rain barrels and ideally be able to supplement with your compost (not a requirement, but still handy). Think amendments, too, comfrey in the compost, comfrey tea, manure in the compost (you know from your chickens and cows), manure tea, kelp in the compost, kelp extract. Blood and bone meal.

After you've got some beneficial insects attracted to your garden with a few items, expand it. The beneficial insects will keep returning and will aid in balancing the destructive ones. Will you have pest problems? Yep, you surely will, if not, why do we have all the insecticides that we have on the market? Will there be disease problems? Absolutely. But it is easier to handle a couple of problems at a time instead of ten and it is all about the balance. The first time you plant something new, you might get lucky and never have a problem with that item, but that won't happen every time you plant something new or even things you've planted for five years in a row. Red wigglers, lady bugs, bees are all beneficial creatures for the garden and you can buy them online to be delivered. While bees take more effort, the worms and lady bugs are released and go to work.

As for adding critters. You can establish them first or second. If first, you'll have a feed bill. If second and you've decided to plant what they will eat and handle it yourself, it might take you a while to get there. Feed is getting more expensive, so consider what it is that your critter of choice will eat and then grow it in the first or second batch of gardening you do so if you plan to not have a feed bill, you're not blind sided by blight, mold, fungus, or insects the first year and end up with an expense you were not expecting. There are numerous sites that have recipes for home made feeds for all sorts of farm animals and game for proper nutrition. If you have enough area, let them forage for themselves. Most of the animals we eat have been around for a long time, they didn't always have us hanging out to feed them either and yet they survived.

Everything is a circle. Your garden feeds you and your critters, your critters will help clean up the garden when its done and help you to fertilize and aerate so you can garden again. The benefits of these things are that you can make your own foods and store them so that you are not depending on a hormonally grown, genetically altered, chemically treated system. The more you do, the better off you are. If you are unable to do as much, you can benefit from a network of trading. Its time and patience and most of all it's a choice.

Obama Gets In On the Act

Ok, so you know that everyone has been buzzing around about how there *should* be a Freedom Garden or Victory Garden on the White House lawn. Welp, the First Family is going to do just that. Amazingly, there will be children from a local school to help the First Lady dig up her lawn for her garden. Can't beat that.

Setting an example to the public is a good thing, but already we've begun to feel the crunch. Several seed websites and forums I have visited recently have already started talking about the seed crunch. They are already having problems coming up with the seed to meet demand of certain vegetable items. One such site in the UK, states that they are just not going to offer individual packets anymore, they are going to focus more on sets of seeds and this is due to the current state of the economy.

The people of the world have already begun to start focusing on where the crisis at hand is leading instead of living in the now. We've heard all the talk of future events due to peak oil, over urbanization and global warming. The disappearing polar ice and with it the polar critters comes to mind. The future has been shoved at the populace so much, it appears that it has taken effect and people are trying to at least begin to prepare for their future. I've also noticed that some of my favorite seed sites have run out of certain popular seeds much faster than I remember it in the past, so even if they have not posted to their site on that fact, it shows there, too.

With luck, the program that the Obama family has begun on their lawn, will spill into many more but I also can't help wondering where all of these people are going to get their seeds. Seeds are already becoming a precious commodity and the garden fever hasn't even really taken root just yet, the word of the impending White House lawn (the First Lawn?) food production only being out for a short period of time. While many gardeners save their seeds, it isn't practiced by everyone so next year the crunch will really be on. My father buys his tomato plants, the seed for beans and peas, and such, and has never in his life practiced seed saving for all the farming he has done and neither has any of our family. What is to become of them next year?

Save your seeds. It is more important now than it has ever been. The lessons we have learned from certain eras such as the famous failed crops of the past and also during the Great Depression, should be ringing true in the ears of every single person on this planet. Now it isn't just the idea of a failed crop it is the idea of countries that export their cash crops now holding in reserve. Rice is a good example of this.

With biofuels at the forefront, Thailand isn't producing rice like it once did, focusing more on biofuel materials than the tons of rice that it used to export has already begun to touch the market. Rice prices are already rising higher than historical averages as the Thai government holds in reserve to feed its own instead of the rest of the world. And Thailand isn't the only country, China stated last year that they would be raising the price bar. It also doesn't help that the idea of using rice as a biofuel took hold in Japan in 2007. And this is all mostly old news.

We can't even really feed the world much less save the seed as a species. So I ask again. Where is everyone going to get their seeds? I have a nice fat stock pile of my own and I share and swap with whomever I can nail down to get that one thing I have never tried to grow. While I have built my own network of really awesome people that I enjoy not only swapping with but chatting with, future gardeners may not be able to jump right into that clique - mine or anyone elses.

I just can't stress enough the importance of saving your seeds. In a world where the economy is in shambles, the food production is going down in favor of finding the replacement to black gold, and people are popping out families faster than the polar ice caps are melting and food riots are expected by 2012, no one's got your back but you and if you aren't saving, you aren't watching your back very well.

So save your seeds and watch as the Obama's start their own garden setting examples to the country and hopefully the world, but be wary of the fact that we are not a small population any longer by any stretch of the imagination. Demand is much larger than supply and even with the massive amounts of seed companies out there, we still have to contend with the fact that Monsanto is destined to own patients on every genetic code for every seed out there and when they do, the home garden is finished. Moving into areas where lands have been farmed for generations and taking people to court so they can shut them down for infringement. I'm betting the price of grow lights will go up sooner than later in that case. I think I'd become an expert in hydroponics damn quick.

So I guess I answered my own question. We'll all be getting out seeds from Monsanto soon enough. I wonder if Obama will endorse that.

More Victory Gardens

http://www.squidoo.com/victorygardenrevival

A nice selection of victory/freedom garden stuff, including a link back to me!

Vintage Victory Garden Film

Vegetable Gardening in WWII: Victory Gardens Vintage Film
Uploaded by QualityInformation

Short but cool.

Freedom Gardens

This is a very interesting set of videos. I encourage everyone that comes through here to watch them.