Letters to the Editor
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Scale is important, all right
Unless you learn how to garden fairly efficiently, you will use up resources rather than produce them, via all the trips to the garden center buying expensive stuff that's shipped from far away, and then going to the grocery store for vegetables and fruit anyway, because most of your crops failed, and the few that succeeded flooded you with so much stuff all at once that you couldn't eat it all. To produce enough vegetables to replace grocery shopping, consistently, you need space and time and sun and skill.
You also need to figure out how to get rid of the raccoons and woodchucks and deer, that are roaming happily around even in city back yards.
By the way, I'm theoretically all in favor of harvesting nuisance wildlife that make good eating: pigeons, geese, swans (mute swans are invasive pests, imported from Europe, and are messing badly with our local wetlands ecosystems) and deer. But I don't expect that to catch on any time soon, and I don't myself have the skills or the inclination to actually do it.
BTW, Ozzieb, digging with your iPod is probably not good for it. And a shovel works better.
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It's probably infinitely BETTER all around to simply join your local CSA or food co-op and but more than anything make every effort possible to avoid waste ...
the amount of food wasted .. in preparation, in food gone-by is enormous in most households. All that rotting food, I gather, is a considerable "greenhouse" gas producer, bigger than cow flatulence.... even
One of my economizing measures recently has been to forgo highly perishable vegetables, like lettuce and tomatoes, in favor of more forgiving veges like carrots, celery, cabbage, cauliflower... Grated salads and salads of cold lightly steamed vegetables work as substitutes quite well.
My own adventures in gardening have been highly pleasurable if not entirely rewarding ... depending on your climate and soil and habits, it can be hard to give many home-grown vegetables the amount of water and sunshine they need to avoid hard-to-digest thick skins and -- again -- it's so easy to wind up with bushels of lettuce, zuchinni .. just about everything you have planted that thrives tends to produce bountifully.
Most of my vegetables had to be grown in containers due to highly iffy nature of the "soil" in my little plot ... and that's not uncommon in urban areas ... previous tenants had run a home-grown body shop ... I've known others with similar concerns about heavy metals and other contaminants.
Perhaps better to grow a small patch of -- locally grown -- flowers, forgo those hot house imports -- and donate the time and money (which adds up quicly) and angst (deliberating various pest control strategies can haunt your dreams) .. and write a check to Unicef or Habitat for Humanity .. iow, better to forgo the "hobby" and put your efforts elsewhere.
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if you have time to mow your lawn, you have time to garden
Seriously though, how much time does the average suburbanite spend moving his/her lawn? Replace some of that lawn with low-maintenance garden, and presto -- less time mowing (with your fossil fuel powered mower) and more time gardening.
Also, I can sympathise with the inner-city thing. I currently live in a small flat with a concrete "yard", but am next year planning on planting some pots with tomato and zucchini plants. Will they feed my whole family for the summer? No. Will they give me a sense of connection to my food, and cut down on the fuel-to-transport/fuel-derived fertilizer/pesticides/supermarket racketeering that I participate in every time I buy a tomato? Yes.
And I heartily agree with a couple of the above posters, that if you can find a local farmer's market, it is the next best thing.
As far as the "only the rich can eat well" nonsense -- I think this is overblown. I heartily agree that anyone earning the minimum wage or on welfare is going to struggle to afford food. Then again, frozen/canned veggies, dried beans, rice and pasta are all pretty damn cheap & healthy and can be bought on sale and saved for later.
I think Pollan's goal in his garden suggestion is to encourage people to re-connect to where their food comes from, and be able to eat something that wasn't produced using (mostly) fossil fuels as its energy source. Its a timely reminder that food can be grown without petrol, in fact, you can even do it in your backyard! (Ok, if you have one.)
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Hee-Hee-hee-hee!
You guys crack me up! This year, starting week after next, we are going to try to grow tomatoes on our 18th floor balcony. (We are not starting now because we are going to Florida next week on a fool's errand, and we fear the tomatoes would die while we are away.)
Anyway, please check back with us late this summer to see whether we have luscious beefsteaks, or only dried-up, worldly-wise Motown Reds. If the tomaters go good this year, next year we will try chickens, but we will dress the chickens up like cats so that our local apartment enforcers can't nail us. Question: Do we need a rooster? Can we still get eggs if we only have a couple of hens?
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Lawn v. Garden
Maybe I'm going about it all wrong, Rowyna, but it takes about 1/2 an hour every other week if it's rainy, and 1/2 an hour every 3-4 weeks if it's a doughty summer, to mow my lawn. I use a nifty thing called a lawnmower. Perhaps if I were going over my lawn with scissors it would take more time to tend it than it would to maintain a vegetable garden.
We all know that vegetable gardens are superior to lawns, but let's be realistic here.
(all this is a lie, anyway. I spend 0 hours on my lawn. I pay someone else to mow it. I was too lazy to even to basic maintenance. It's money well spent, and I'm sure my neighbors thank me too: I got nasty comments before I outsourced.)
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Fruit is a bettter bet
Vegetable gardening takes a lot of work. If you like to do it (I do), it counts as leisure. If you don't, it's a tedious chore.
Most shrub fruit (red and black currants, gooseberries, blueberries, etc) take very little work. They're decorative. I don't see why more people don't have a few bushes. (And for everyone who lives in a state worried about Pine blister rust, there are immune varieties of currants)
Equally, fruit trees are low effort if you're willing to eat less than perfectly round, unblemished, chemically doused fruit.
Raspberries and blackberries can be weeds.
Fruit is expensive, too. You save a lot more money with far less effort harvesting a pint of blueberries than you do raising potatos or onions.
As a side point, while home grown strawberries are delicious, they are not low work, in my experience.
Anyway, someone who has no light in the backyard and no time to garden should plant a few blueberry or currant bushes in their front yard. (Blueberry for acid soil, currant for alkaline.)