Tip from an old geezer: Plant Your Victory Garden Now!
Where are you?
I’m near Toronto, started my seedlings indoors ~6 weeks ago, and already eating small kale leaves and lettuce that’s somehow growing in the grass.
A dying apple tree gave me more than I could eat for 2-3 months last year. Gonna plant a pear tree in the front yard.
I love visiting my parents while it’s going apeshit. Crisp pears all day.
The last few years I planted I got my starts going real early in my basement and we had an early spring and I was over the moon. But I had a few cold springs that didn't warm up until June and had to replant multiple times. Rookie mistakes and bad luck. :)
There are tons of good ideas out there about preserving your own food. But, I agree, that a small garden won't take a big bite out of your food needs. You're not trying to become self-sufficient, you're trying to lower your reliance on store-bought food.
That's huge; I haven't seen anything like that, even in the deep country where I grew up, where people (farmers) almost didn't buy anything but grew and processed most of their stuff. Their gardens hardly ever went over a 1/4 of an acre, I'd say, that was already pretty large and provided for filling quite a number of jar of tomatoes and beans and stuff.
Didn't your parents sell anything?
Using 400-500 sq ft, I get enough potatoes for a family of 3. Not that potato is our only staple food, but...
I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a day on it (average on 365 days, which means more at times and nothing at other times). Surely it requires more space that you had. But no motorised tool involved, no fertiliser but a tiny bit of manure (no fancy permaculture tricks either, just traditional beds), no pesticide except in case of emergency like once a year on 10% of the garden, no watering except in case of emergency again, no search of any optimisation (time, space, yield, ...). It isn't a bid deal to get a partial yet significant autonomy; it just gets harder and harder as you want to get close to 100%.
There are stuff you can keep across winter in storage without transformation, like potatoes or cereals (onions, shallot don't do bad either); and stuff that can be kept where they lie, in the ground, like parsnip, sunchoke, and a few other root vegetables; cabbage can stay too, leeks as well. (Of course, it depends on the geographical location.)
Yeah, a base of potatoes + cabbages + onions get you a long way; and they are quite versatile as far as cooking is concerned.
-Use raised beds or Hugelkulture to increase yields. -Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space -Develop a three stage compost pile. Import food waste from others in your neighborhood if needs be. -Grow year round with cold frames -Use cover crops to enrich soil over winter
Thats how you garden to eat my friends
https://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-More-Vegetables-Possible/dp/...
5gal buckets my friend. Cheap or free if you keep a lookout or have winemaking friends. Free-$2 per bucket for food grade. Pretty much the cheapest you’ll get per gallon of plant space. But I use ours to increase our garden space onto valueless concrete surfaces.
Slugs will eat 1/2 a tomato in a night.
The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.
I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.
Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.
We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
> very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
It could, but this would probably be a pretty bad thing. I guess it depends how many people who currently have fake bullshit jobs transition to being farm workers. My guess is that almost everyone who would go into an expanded ag labor base is currently doing some actually useful work, and we would suffer a severe net decrease in labor output, if we tanked farming efficiency.
In this specific example, there might have been other causes.
In general I agree with you, getting the entire US to "go Amish" isn't viable. Just picking on your example which leaves out some of the details about how the transition was "promoted".
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.
From the link in the parent post:
Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
No, the effect on supply is the same.
> A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food
It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
> an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
I guarantee this is some misleading bullshit statistic. They've probably selected "fresh vegetables" to mean some very small subset of industrial agriculture, like vegetables that are never canned or frozen.
well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).
It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical.
It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.
Yes, I tried to be clear:
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
No one's backyard garden in the USA is going to help feed someone in Africa, but even if the global food shortage doesn't mean food shortages in the USA, it's going to drive up prices, and a backyard garden can help offset that household expense.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
Yes, that's why I quoted it specifically and clarified that I was talking about a home garden.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
The people that benefit the most financially from a home garden are already low paid - those are the people that aren't going to struggle to afford food as prices rise. My sister has been gardening for years, a couple years ago she kept a spreadsheet and added up her savings based on retail prices of produce and her "revenue" from her garden (which covers most of the back yard of her 1/2 acre lot plus one apple tree) was over $2500 after deducting expenses (excluding labor).
She estimated around 2 hours/day tending the garden for a 6 month growing season, so that's around 360 hours of work, or around $7/hour, which is better than she'd take home working a minimum wage job and in exchange they get all of the organic produce they can eat in the summer, plus a lot of frozen or canned food in the winter. And she ends up giving a lot of it away to friends/family.
For a lot of people here, putting in 360 hours of work to earn "only" $2500 worth of food sounds like a terrible bargain, but for many people in this country, that's a great bargain.
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc
This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.
We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.
It seems to me that the more people who supplement their food supply with goods that don’t depend on imported supply (home or community gardens) lessens demand fractionally on the general supply, which fractionally helps with local pricing and household budgets, both of which are positives.
I’m not sure it’s ever been a requirement of victory gardens to be completely autonomous unless ur a hardcore prepper.
The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.
A garden is great, but it's not gonna solve a global food crisis.
Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. In wartime, governments encouraged people to plant victory gardens not only to supplement their rations but also to boost morale. They were used along with rationing stamps and cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply.
Source?
https://www.thespruce.com/how-many-vegetables-per-person-in-...
> To grow all the food for one person's needs for the whole year requires, for most people, at least 4,000 square feet—though some diet designs are possible that can use a smaller area.
https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-fee...
> A 0.44 acre of land can produce enough vegetables and fruits to meet up with the daily calories needed for one person to feed for a year.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1993:
> It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.
> The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies.
Cut out meat and it gets better, but not that much better.
"One 4 × 4 Square Foot Garden box (16 square feet) will supply enough produce to make a salad for one adult every day of the growing season." [0]
0. Bartholomew, Mel. All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated: MORE Projects NEW Solutions GROW Vegetables Anywhere (p. 61). Cool Springs Press. Kindle Edition.
I was tempted to leave their corpses on her doorstep and egg the municipal building as a petty sort of revenge, but that would have been too obvious.
Those chickens were good eating, though, especially with some homegrown corn on the cob and baked beans. The squash didn't work out so well, unfortunately.
Never really bothered me since they mostly just hung out around the back fence far from my house, but finally another neighbor complained to the city and they had to get rid of the chickens. Chickens are allowed here (up to 10 per property), but have to be kept confined and on your own property.
If they hated my garden and chickens, they’re really gonna hate my 40’ Rohn and guidewires!
Is it for shortwave or ham radio?
I'm sorry
Please keep that sort of slur off HN. We don't need it here, and you don't need it to make your substantive points.
Edit: I've added the context back by quoting what the GP originally said. I guess one good passive-aggressive stealth edit deserves another.
Though, in this specific context, appending something like "Edit: 's/Karens/vigilantes/g'" would be the unambiguous way to document the edit.
- Getting snarky because they did the reasonable thing and got rid of the slur after it was pointed out
- Calling said user a dick. If Karen is a misogynistic slur, How is dick not moreso misandristic? I realize you said "dick move", but that's functionally the same. Saying something was a "c?nt move" or a "n????r move" would be tantamount to calling someone a c?nt or n????r.
- Because maybe it made your comment "look stupid"
Jawdropping desecration of the guidelines. You need a vacation.
Edit: look you guys, We're not Bowdlers and have never been interested in language policing but I wouldn't have thought this was a borderline case.
A Karen is no more an inappropriate slur than many other useful words and phrases that are negative, such as goody-two-shoes, busybody, bully, crank, etc.
I don’t see how it helps to ban negative words.
Dang is totally in the right to scold people for saying this.
I think that may be an overly heated response.
Given that I have seen the term used as a pronoun applied to multiple genders, sex preferences, races, ethnicities, etc, I see the term as speaking to behaviors, rather than being a pejorative unique to a group. Here are good examples of it being applied across multiple ethnicities and genders [1] & [2] . There is even a transgender karen [3] .
Normally it is applied to people acting improperly, hall-monitor type of behaviors where it is not warranted. Someone maliciously reporting food growing in a backyard meets the definition.
Please don't make decisions based off Wikipedia [4] or dictionary.com [5] redefining a word to meet a specific agenda.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gncDv1GNF4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0msiW0mEVo
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Wj9GqsmAI
Au contraire.
The word Karen reaching a tipping point in public awareness associated with the Gamestop incident I already pointed out. Many of us have seen it. We're aware of it, we know about it. And we know it is potent, otherwise it wouldn't be on the chopping block for redefinition. And forever, when I think of the word Karen, I think of that particular incident.
The word in that sense, has a great deal of similarity with a tiny little phrase, of a mere two words.
Mission Accomplished.
Whether tearful, premature, ironic, deceptive, tragic, or an example of great hubris, many of us living will forever associate those two words with George W. Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the incalculable human suffering of an unpopular war. The friends we lost after that, and military adventurism run amok. The missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. So much is wrapped up in those two words. And forever, when I think of the phrase Mission Accomplished, I think of that particular speech.
Please do not tell me that HN is going to redefine a word for me, whether it is Karen, or Mission Accomplished, or some other phrase.
We don't need civilized pejoratives that are completely decent for dinner table talk to be conflated with uncivilized utterances not fit for the written or spoken word.
Dang should not become a speech dictator.
Directing tropey slurs at people is mostly not ok on HN and it's been moderated like that for ages.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It's not super-complicated.
I've provided numerous examples of how it isn't restricted to a specific group and is instead aimed at behaviors.
It is quite similar to the word milquetoast. A mild pejorative aimed at a behavior.
Please stop reaching and trying to conflate it with racial or ethnic slurs.
Better than your previous phrasing, but try again; if the action that they took was to report you to the government then they are the opposite of a vigilante by definition.