Back To the Land.2
Monday March 17, 2008
Categories: Culture
Fascinating, encouraging story from yesterday's Times, about young people who are reading Michael Pollan and others, and not just enthusing about growing organically and making artisanal foods, but who are actually picking up and moving out to the countryside to...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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My town of Santa Fe, NM, has gotten some minor national press attention for a new downtown development project, turning an old railyard district in to a public space with parks, artist lofts, performance space and a large year-round indoor farmer's market. Here's a bit about it:
http://www.santafefarmersmarket.com/institute/future/
Bless,
Doug
"me, I'm the second coming of Jean de Florette"
Ha! I actually got that joke. :-)
God bless.
I was happy to see Hearty Roots farm profiled in that article. My family has been a member for two seasons now.
CSAs are great. So are food coops. So are backyard gardens. This city girl tried her hand at growing her own for the first time last summer and I ended up with lots of tomatoes, peppers, spinach, mint and parsley. Knowing the soil where your food comes from is definitely a wonderful, life-affirming thing.
B.D., that's so encouraging to hear. Julie and I are thinking about building a backyard salad garden. The NYT, I think, had a piece last year on how you can build a raised bed that's actually pretty small, but grow enough varieties of lettuce and other greens in it to keep you in salad throughout the summer.
"She often wakes up at 5 a.m. and collapses into an exhausted sleep by 9 p.m." - article
A perfect example of David Letterman's old NBC-era quip, "I was tired, but it was a good kind of tired."
Well, Rod, if you're going to try to grow lettuce in Dallas, you better get cracking. Lettuce and other delicate salad greens do not care for the heat at all! Check with your county extension office, or some local gardening site for the best varieties and planting times. I have grown spinach here in Wichita, and had to plant it pretty darn early. It was great, though. Raised beds work well, especially if your soil is heavy clay, as mine is. I've had a lot of success with green beans (don't mind the heat so much) and, of course, tomatoes.
Rod, if you haven't yet, you might want to check out the book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It should have all you need to know to overcome your inner Jean de Florette. After you get the hang of that, move on to Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. You're about in Hardiness Zone 8, right? No reason why you can't have fresh salad greens all year long (also, carrots, leeks, cabbages, brussels sprouts -- take advantage of that warm climate!).
When I was a kid growing up on a farm 25-30 years ago, we tried taking vegetables to the farmers' market in town, but it never did much more than pay for the gas to get there. Most of the vendors were retired people who didn't care if they profited at all, so they sold everything dirt-cheap, and the customers were only looking for cheaper bargains than the grocery store. It's great to see that they're starting to draw people who are willing to pay for quality, so small farmers can actually make a living.
My fiance and I will be getting land to start a farm within the next year or so. We haven't completely decided what we'll be raising yet, although we're sure to have chickens and pastured pork and beef in the Joel Salatin mode. I used to think the only way I'd get to farm was if I made enough money at a "day job" to make up for the farm's losses. Now there's no reason the farm can't support itself and us, eventually!
I second the recommendation for Square Foot Gardening.
Mhoram: "I used to think the only way I'd get to farm was if I made enough money at a "day job" to make up for the farm's losses. Now there's no reason the farm can't support itself and us, eventually!"
Well, the U.S. gov't. is trying hard to come up with one. It's a program called National Amimal Identification System. I keep trying to read up on it but the rules, regulations and arguments for and against are so convuluted that I just end up getting a headache. Which is what this program sounds like for the agrarian farmers. One big headache.
I know there are several blogs involved a "NO NAIS" movement and they feel that the time it takes farmers to do the paperwork involved in keeping animals will force them to charge more for their products and make it hardly worth the effort to raise animals to sell for food. This does not even take in to consideration the price of having some type of GPS chip installed in your organic chicken to track the poor thing in case it should decide to poop in the neighbor's yard. Then
should it decide to poop in the neighbor's yard, there is more paper work to follow.
I am not a farmer. I have always wanted to be, but circumstances leave
me living in a small, very small, city. If NAIS goes through, I will probably never move to a piece of land where I can farm because there will be no future in it. Not much sense in it either as far as I can see.
Oh, and here's the kicker. This is all supposedly done to help track animal diseases and keep all us stupid American citizens safe but the big factory farms where all the recalled hamburger and chickens come from are exempt from tagging their animals because there are just to many of them.
I know this is rather poorly written but I get so upset when I think about what this means to the way of life we "Crunchy Cons" and "Crunchy non-Cons" aspire to that my hands start to shake (or it could be my third cup of coffee that's doing it.)
Anyhow, my advice to all of you who want organic beef and chicken and artisan goat cheese at all, let alone at a price you can afford, is to check out some agrarian blogs that discuss this- Granny Miller and the Sugar Mountain blogs are good, as well as the Deliberate Agrarian, although I don't know if he has a NoNais symbol, I can't remember. Sorry for not giving the proper web addresses, I'm not sure how to do that yet. And then to write your representatives and let them know how badly this idea stinks.
Perhaps someone like Joel Salatin, who I'm willing to bet is more than against it could explain it better and get you all as worked up as I get over the prospect. I mean even the Soviet Union didn't require papers to prove piggy citizenship, did they?
When you google the "Sugar Mountain" blog it's Sugar Mountain Farm. If you try just "Sugar Mountain" you get lots of ski area sites. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Anyway, my bad. Sorry.
Can I grow food in the city? I guess my real question is: how much yard do I need to provide for my own family?
Rod: We are trying raised bed gardening this spring/summer/fall as well. We bought the book 'Square Foot Gardening,' and it looks pretty simple and a lot less labor-intensive than the traditional method of gardening, which is what we did last year. What we're going to focus on this year is to stagger our plantings according to the season: planting hardier greens like kale and spinach in the fall and spring before it gets too cold vs. planting lettuce and more tender greens in the hotter summer months. Tomatoes and herbs can be grown in a whiskey barrel. And kale can be harvested well after the first frost.
Tom: You might want to try this site: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/pathproject/
It details an urban garden built on something like 1/5 of an acre, which support four adults year-round. They share their growing tips as well as sponsor a forum; there are also other useful links. Rod, I hope it was okay to link to another website from your blog.
"She often wakes up at 5 a.m. and collapses into an exhausted sleep by 9 p.m." - article
A perfect example of David Letterman's old NBC-era quip, "I was tired, but it was a good kind of tired."
Scott: I had dinner once with Miriam Latzer (sp?), the woman from that article who made that quote and she said that this farm work was one of the most satisfying things she's ever done. I found her to be an intriguing character partly because she told me that she could fit all her worldly possessions into one duffel bag. That was fascinating to me.
bd: "she said that this farm work was one of the most satisfying things she's ever done."
Would that more of us ventured thus.
"I found her to be an intriguing character partly because she told me that she could fit all her worldly possessions into one duffel bag."
I love that, too. I can, at 46, fit all *my* worldly possessions into my 1993 Toyota Camry, so I am, to quote Bon Jovi, "halfway there."
Here's another Times article for those wishing to extend their green thumbs to shoulder length, in recalling the Nick Drake lyric, "Fame is but a fruit tree...":
HOME & GARDEN | March 13, 2008
Backyards, Beware: An Orchard Wants Your Spot
In an era of local food, an increasing number of Americans are turning their yards into mini orchards, even in dense urban areas.
nytimes.com/2008/03/13/garden/13orchyarding.html
Tom: Can you grow food in the city? Oh, my, yes. Even if it's only a little bit, that helps. I think one of the keys to getting ourselves out of the fix we're into, foodwise, is lots and lots of little experiments, a generous application of imagination, and a willingness to get dirt under the fingernails. There're many resources and examples out there, but the best way to figure out what works for you in your local conditions is to go ahead and give it a shot.
Urban farmers of the world, unite! You have nothing to loose but your dependence on an unhealthy and unsustainable food system.
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