Letters to the Editor
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You have three sequoia in your back yard?
You really are landed gentry.
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throw away comments
hey, electro robot, i'm trying real hard to figure you out. what do you even mean by "urban hippies are stealing my water"? that doesn't make any sense on many levels. in order for someone to "steal" your water, it has to be yours in the first place. additionally, if you're really speaking of urban hippies you need to consider that they'll probably use a rain barrel if they are in a water-sensitive area.
i'd have to say that the lawns of Arizona, Nevada and Atlanta have diverted more water from fruitful uses than you will ever be able to blame "hippies" on. i'll even give the golf courses a pass and say their water use is justified. that still leaves us with countless decorative lawns maintained solely so that some yahoo in the desert can be proud of how good his immigrant-labor maintained lawn looks.
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we may not get a choise
when looking at victory gardens we cannot overlook the context. food was rationed, gas was rationed, there was an enormous war going on sucking up all industrial output. it was a time of artificially created shortages (by an interventionist government no less!) that pushed people to not only express their patriotism, but also put vegetables on the table. we are now entering a period where insted of artificial shortages, we will begin to see real shortages, as our agriculture that is only efficient with high hydrocarbon inputs begins to feel the strain of less and less available energy. right now you are lucky someone is willing to pay you enough to write articles so you can make a choice between cutting down some trees in your back yard and eating. many people the world over do not have such luxury, and the home garden keeps many from hunger. if hyperinflation hits, along with high unemployment, economic stagnation, and last but not least a collapse of our food system due to lack of energy inputs (necessary at every level from the tractors to the fertilizer to the transport to you), well i hope you don't mind a little dirt under your nails.
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Chickens
We have three chickens in our backyard and live in a medium sized college town. They do require some work--regular feeding and watering and adding straw to their pen/chicken yard. Our 11 year old feeds and waters them before school, but we do have to check up on him pretty regularly to make sure he's doing a good job. We don't have a rooster for obvious reasons. We haven't had any problems with the neighbors except for the chickens' first summer when they discovered they could jump the fence and root and peck in our neighbor's rose garden. She was nice about it, but when clipping their wings didn't work (they climbed the fence) my husband decided to build them a larger enclosure. He still thinks they should stay in it all the time. I like for them to have some time to free range. So I occasionally let them out and then he puts them back in.
They don't smell bad, the eggs are delicious, and they are very funny animals. When the 11 year old forgets to feed them they come up to our kitchen door and cluck at us. By the way, we also have two full time jobs and three kids, just to let people know that they are not all that time consuming.
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Well eat the weeds then!
I am an apartment dweller with access to deep shade raised beds that I installed over the concrete. You can in fact grow your lettuce and leafy vegetables in shade. Grapes and other vines will climb to the sun. But perhaps more importantly, the weeds that tend to grow are not only tasty, but more nutritious than conventional produce. And they are relatively low maintenance.
Oxalis makes a tasty lemon-flavored green, so long as you don't overdo it. Smartweed has crunchy flowers. Wild mustard greens, harvested before flowering make a good potherb and the flowers enliven salads. Steam lambsquarters. Japanese knotweed shoots can be cooked like asparagus. Dandelions provide edible leaves (cooked or raw), roots and the flowers taste like sunshine. I may still have some vintage Berkeley dandelion wine. Violet greens are good cooked or raw and the purple pseudoflowers are a tasty source of Vitamin C. Nettles are one of the most nutritious greens- marinated in tamari with garlic or wild onions, cooked like spinach, infused for a mineral-rich tea. Just pinch hard when you pick them.
I adopted a church garden and can eat all the weeds I can harvest. And lots of the plants are medicinal as well as decorative. Urban farming is easy if you don't try to plant things that don't grow. And there is still time for biking.
Karen Vaughan
Registered Herbalist (AHG)
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take a lesson from the WWII victory gardens
For those of you who want to garden who, like the author, have yards unsuitable for gardening, or those in apartments with no lawns, check in your community for Community Gardens. During World War II, many of those famous Victory Gardens were not in people's individual back yards. Instead they found an empty plot of land in the area suitable for gardening and parceled it out to community members. Not only did it allow them to grow food for personal use, it had a sense of community. It also had the advantage that if you grew, say, tomatoes, and your neighbor grew beans you could trade, and also help watch over other plots.
Many areas have already established community gardens, often coordinated through park districts. If you can't find one and are ambitious enough, you might be able to round up a group of like-minded neighbors and get some space in a local park set aside for such use.
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Is anyone worried that we might not have a choice?
I'm not a truly experienced gardener--this is only the second year I'm trying my hand at it--but I want to mention that this year I'm growing hops. (I've been brewing my own beer for about a year now too.) What's interesting is that a lot of the homebrewers that I know are also growing hops. The problem is a global hop shortage that has made the common beer ingredient a little hard to come by. Any homebrewer can tell you that the price of hops has doubled in a short time, and that's if you can find someplace that has the variety you want. Consumers will begin to notice the hop shortage too when prices go up and local microbrews start going out of business.
So what happens when increasing oil costs make prices of fresh vegetables go up? Is it possible that we could see a situation where gardening is the only way to avoid paying through the nose for fresh vegetables?
I enjoy the fact that, right now, I don't need to garden to be able to afford food. But if that ever changes, I'll be glad that I learned a little about growing tomatoes in my back yard during the years of plenty.