@GardenSeed posted a twit a few months ago that warrants a re-visit. What she said was “let’s all help the economy with some small victory gardens. check this out for free seeds & tips http://bit.ly/ebN9j”
Her thinking was, and is, good.
A large part of “The American Dream” is self-sufficiency. For many decades, this has been defined as having enough money to buy enough food. Many who thought that they had achieved this, find that their supply of money has now been cut off and their supply of food is now endangered. Make no mistake, the public dole is not bottomless … at some point the well will run dry, as it did for the Irish in the 1850s when the population of Ireland was reduced by 4,000,000 people. A large number of those simply starved to death or died from dietary diseases such as scurvy. Some, my ancestors included, bought a ticket in the bottom of the boat and somehow survived the journey.
Not a pretty picture.
Do not be confused by the date … it is also happening right here in the US. The numbers are still small enough to sneak under the radar of a public enamored of starlets and a President who won a Nobel Peace Prize without having stopped or prevented a single conflict. (Duh???)
Here, in the middle portion of the United States, many home owners have large lawns that cost them a boot-load to tend properly. A typical suburban yard is sufficient to feed all the occupants of the house plopped right in the middle of it. I know that I (this year was a flop – my first ever) typically pull roughly $3,500 worth of groceries off less than 1/2 of my tiny backyard.
So think about it. The bankers and politicians add NOTHING to the GNP. But even the tiniest of vegetable gardens does. And every dollars worth of produce you get from your garden frees you from having to earn $1.30 in pre-tax wages.
Consider this: if your garden was 500 square feet (50×10 or 25×20), it would be more than double the size of my garden of 240 sq. ft. My garden is valued at $14.58 / sq. ft. (home gardens are MUCH more productive than farmed land). If you set aside 500 sq. ft., your gross value would be closer to $7,300, which would free up nearly $9,500 in gross income. This means that even if you lost ~$190 gross earnings per week you would not have to surrender any portion of your current lifestyle. For someone earning $10 per hour (and lots of folks ‘get by’ on exactly that), this means that they could lose 1/2 of their wages and still survive.
Just some numbers to play with, folks. You don’t think us old-timers garden simply for the love of it, do you? Yup, the sun feels good on our liver spots and nothing beats a tomato sandwich with the tomato still warm from the garden. But that’s not the only reason we do it.
You say that your spouse and kids won’t let you have a garden? Above and beyond simply being the lamest excuse on the planet, you need to look up http://bit.ly/ZMDPY . If you live in other states, see if they have similar programs. I found a 40 x 130 (5,200 sq. ft.) parcel through this program that is only one block from my home. That’s 20x the size of my current garden. I won’t see $14.58 per sq. ft. from it this year; but I leased it for 3 years.
