City-Roots

This is not what being self-sufficient is all about.

With unemployment benefits running out for a staggeringly huge number of people in the United States and elsewhere, it looks to be a long, cold, winter. For many, it will be a hungry one, too.

But it didn’t have to be that way this year and it doesn’t have to be that way next year.

If you have a backyard, or just know of an undisturbed place in an alley or alongside the road, you can grow enough food to feed at least two people, probably more. If you add in the front yard, you can likely feed more people than you can house. If you live in the warmer parts of the world (roughly 40-45 deg. north and south latitude and some areas outside of that warmed by coastal currents or favorable winds) you can plant and harvest all year around. Sometimes seeds, sometimes bulbs, sometimes plants, depending on the local weather patterns. But you can plant. And, if you can plant, tend, reap and prepare, you can eat.

This is the first post of a multi-part series (with the first 8 parts essentially complete) and marks a new, more aggressive, editorial direction. For quite some time now I’ve not posted much of anything because I didn’t like the ‘me too’ direction I had started out in. I think I wrote a pretty good series about growing tomatoes – I certainly had fun doing the artwork – and my readers seemed to like the slug article, but there are tons of nearly identical ‘de rigueur’ articles on the internet. Until fresh research turns up something startling, there just isn’t anything left to write on these topics. (Read the slug article – I did stumble on something new that works surprisingly well.) Although I am not removing those posts and, indeed, I plan to add to them from time to time, I’m taking a new direction.

Gardening is often seen as this sort of passive thing that people who like vegetables or pansies do … a harmless pastime, like painting by number, for those with no real talent or drive.

I don’t think so … I never have thought so, but, like most gardeners, I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words before so I just put my passion into the soil. Well, as you’ll see by the writing that follows, I’ve found the words.

– Bill