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

You are probably here because you agree that organic food is a good idea. In that case, you might might be interested in this 5:47 radio link.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

You may also be interested in knowing that Ireland is now officially and completely GMO free. Even so-called ‘trial fields’ (which end up contaminating the surrounding fields as their pollen spreads) are no longer permitted. This is a HUGE victory … to have even ONE government stand up to big agri-business instead of cowering before it, as the US, Canadian and British governments have.

Obama betrayed us all in his appointment of a representative of big-ag as our nations ag representative … but what else are we to expect? The guy he appointed is associated with the agribusiness lobbying group that started the “groundswell” letter writing campaign against the Whitehouse organic garden. Obama is too much of a politician, and not enough of a man, to stand up to these folks … but it looks like the Irish are up to the task.

Just this month the front cover of Forbes called Monsanto “Seed Heroes”.

(hack, cough, cough) Balderdash.

I may buy a copy just so I can frame that cover as evidence that Forbes has abandoned even the pretext of journalistic integrity and cannot be trusted to be truthful in any matter whatsoever.

The linked video, about the effects of chemical farming in India, is instructive. I know that your time is valuable. I’m asking for 30 minutes of it with the promise that I will not waste even a single minute. Start by viewing the video for the first 26 minutes.

Then, with the other 4 minutes, read and meditate on Revelation 11:18 — especially that last clause.

“But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”

Look around you at the synthetic material in your home, your clothing, your containers, your car, your workplace, your places of worship and recreation and the vendors you do business with. And anyplace else that you can think of that I left off the list.

Most plastics NEVER biodegrade and putting them at curbside for pickup does NOT take care of the problem: the plastic is still on the planet … and so are you. Using them willingly makes us just as guilty of ruining the earth as their manufacturers, because we are the ones who provide the economic justification for their manufacture. No acceptance = no consumption = no sale = no manufacture.

As I write this, I move my plastic mouse around on a foam rubber mat and type on a plastic keyboard on my plastic laptop full of phenolic resin circuit boards and powered by a lithium battery. It’s sitting on a wood composition desk that contains, among other things, formaldehyde binding the termite puke together and some sort of vinyl, paper and ink fake wood grain surface treatment. Thank you, Sauder, for a desk that could have cost me thousands of dollars to have made in wood, but only a few hundred to slide out of a box and assemble on site.

Now, do you think you could do the same thing without the poisons?

I humbly acknowledge that the problem of getting plastic out of our lives and pesticide out of our foods is not a simple one; but somewhere along the line we’ve at least got to try. Pitching the existing plastic and using hemp grocery shopping bags is just a symbolic gesture, not the cure … the pitched bags have nowhere to go. But it is, at the very least, a start.

Do you remember when Madison Avenue was pitching us to change from paper grocery bags to plastic ones? We were told that the plastic was a lot cheaper to use and it was implied that this would favorably impact the cost of groceries. Well, the money difference is perhaps 3-5 cents per bag against the paper version which never seems to have shown up in MY grocery receipts, but the environmental difference is totally lopsided against the plastic. Paper versions decompose biologically … eventually becoming new trees. Or zucchini, or something else living. On the other hand, the plastic versions photo degrade until they are small enough to enter the food chain and then begin the march up that chain to your dinner plate. Even when they have degraded all the way down to the molecular level, that molecule is still an indigestible long chain polymer; some of which are mistaken by the endocrine system for the hormone estradiol.

Someone in Great Britain with too much time on their hands calculated that the average work life of the million or so plastic bags used in that country PER DAY was only about 7 minutes. Its lifetime after that is measured in millennia.

Plural.

I mention the plastic because we in America may be willing to accept birth defects in India as simply a sad fact of life … especially since it lowers the price of almonds for us. But are we willing to accept plastics in the edible portions of our own foods? The point being, we will not ‘get off the dime’ until we perceive a direct and significant threat to ourselves.

Monsanto makes the chemicals used in India. It also holds most of the GMO patents and sells roughly 70% of the world’s seeds. And it also makes a mountain of plastic each and every year. This DOES affect us and, unlike the people in India, we are actually in a position to take action against it.

– Bill

If you’ve read this far, you are probably also interested in at least a few of the additional videos at the bottom of the linked video page.

I was checking Google for some of the keywords I want to rank for and was tickled to find that this blog is on the front page for multiple keywords multiple times. That, as any blogger will tell you, is the sweet smell of success! So I called Mrs. Bill in and we had a good laugh, feeling somewhat giddy about those results.  However, while I was at it, I decided to look at one of the blogs that ranked with me.

Wow, did I ever get my eyes opened.

I was stunned to find that the discussion of gardening activism has only two viewpoints: “The Milquetoasts” staying quietly at home while tending a few pansies and “Grub & Snapdragon Alphatrowel” set to change the world overnight: by force, if need be. There didn’t seem to be a middle-ground perspective. In this case, the debate developed around the disputes regarding global climate change. I’ll agree that this is an interesting problem, but I won’t agree that this should be the central focus of gardening activists. The problem with this polarity is that most of us occupy a middle ground, finding it defensible and a firm base from which to extend our reach. One. Garden. At. A. Time.

What good does it do to fight un-winnable battles while neglecting the victories that are actually within our grasp? Global warming is just one of these un-winnable battles. Think for a moment and you will uncover others, such as off-shore oil drilling or the use of chemical fertilizers that has created a vast dead-zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. It takes big resources to fight big enemies.

What about those of us who want food independence for ourselves and to turn our neighbors on to this quiet revolution? We can’t stop the UN … or the WTO … they’ve got more bullets than we have seeds. But we can render their policies as they affect our dinner table moot.

That’s right: we can stop them at the fork and that is a victory that the global-warming mongers and nay-sayers can never win. To the extent their focus has been blunted and deflected into empty debates, their power to cause positive change has been frittered away. Meanwhile, the real movers and shakers continue silently along the paths of their original agendas.

Carbon sequestration? That seems to be the buzz-word du jour with the climate change crowd. The whole argument centers around the question of CO2 … its effects and its sources. No one seems to have a problem with the two molecules of Oxygen, lots of people object to that single liberated molecule of carbon. Well, here’s a fact that can’t be argued: Every gardener who ever turned garden or animal waste back into the soil sequestered carbon; sometimes a surprisingly large amount of it. It isn’t unusual for a single gardener to make a ton or more of compost in one season and to turn it back into the soil at the start of the next. Whether the purpose in so doing is to enrich the soil, reduce the load on garbage dumps or to sequester carbon willy-nilly is irrelevant. The point is that returning nutrients to the soil has always been and will always be a net positive for the humans who inhabit this tiny rock with its microscopic layer of breathable air and its limited habitable zones.

Can’t wrap your head around sequestration? Try this out: “The average conventional produce item travels 1,500 miles, using, if shipped by tractor-trailer, one gallon of fossil fuel per hundred pounds.”

To sequester the stuff means to pull it back out of the atmosphere and tuck it away somewhere safe for a while. But, to grow food locally means not putting the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to begin with.

That’s my brand of garden activism. Simply learn what the right things to do are … and do them. Over, and over again.

You don’t have to stick your neck out to be a garden activist or engage in full-on food politics to earn some sort of street cred with me. It’s enough if you can plant a few seeds, put back a few jars and tuck some compost back into the soil for next year. Anything beyond that is gravy.

I pass out bonus points like the government passes out tax shelters for the rich if you teach one or more in the current generation of youth why and how to do this. Let them preserve, by whatever means are suitable, some food for their families. It will stop being theory and start being valuable.

So, whatever level you can contribute at is good. Keep those pansies growing (dig some compost or manure in around the roots, eh?), keep the heat on the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, the EPA and all the rest of the alphabet soup of government and quasi-government agencies. Hold their toes to a rip-roaring fire if you can. Or just quietly get things organized for the next nice day in your garden.

It’s all good.

– Bill

I’m writing, and writing and writing. But I’m not posting much yet.

I want to get the appearance of the blog settled so that I am not constantly tweaking it later. I’m sitting on at least a dozen posts and quite possibly twice that amount (begun, but not ready for prime time): and that’s before I even start to hear back from you. Recent postings include a seriously updated “About” page and a brand-new page for Contacting me and a “Help-Wanted” page. I am earnestly looking to engage other writers who want to make a stand for gardening activism as a force for social change.

In fact, returning visitors are as likely to find a 404 Error greeting them as they are to find the page they linked to. I’m already working on that and will get it properly taken care of as fast as my fingers can get to it.

The theme I’ve been toying with all week (Atahualpa 3.4.9) simply isn’t going to work. It has problems remembering what I put in the widget areas. So, basically, that’s a wasted week in the rubbish bin. I tried installing the updated version (3.5.3) and it has coding problems that keep it from displaying even the first page. Fine. I don’t feel like fighting just to get basic functions to work.

I guess that it’s better to see these things early rather than later on. I really liked the appearance of Atahualpa 3.4.9, I’m sorry things aren’t going to work out.

The current theme is the stock 2010 theme from WordPress. I’m going to take a close look at it this week to see if it has all of the features I need. If so, it can stay. I”ve already changed the header image to one taken in Aruba. One of the features I really liked about Atahualpa was its header rotation.  If I can get that going in the 2010 theme, I have other photos I want to add and I’d like to incorporate some of yours, too.

I also have a copy of 2010 Weaver aboard. I’ve used it for a client’s site and I know that, while it has a quirk or two, it is very serviceable. It doesn’t put the blog title in <H1>, so that’s something of a bummer because that’s important in SEO. However, with the right plug-ins and strategy, it is still possible to get good rankings with it. I was able to get 4 posts in a row in the top 20, one at #7. Sadly, with the Google maps and the sponsored listings taking up so much space, #7 is still below the fold.

I think that finding I could get good rankings with a client’s site is what has inspired me to come back and work on this blog again. That, and a sense that things are getting out of hand in the US and elsewhere around the globe and that there are people, lots of them, who are far too dependent on the largess of a government that can shape responses to policy by granting or withholding that largess. We are contemplating huge tax cuts for the wealthy while those on Social Security have gone two years without a cost of living increase and the middle class has actually lost ground for the past 10 years.

We used to be able to feed ourselves without the approval of politicians. We still can. I’m here to see to it that that happens again because, while it’s easy to coerce a hungry man, it’s a much harder to challenge a fed (& fed up) one.

– Bill