Growing Your Own Food
Filed Under Grow Your Own Food, Keeping Chickens | Comments Off
When I was growing up in England in the Sixties, my mother and Father used to have a vegetable garden with a whole host of produce.
Potatoes, green beans, peas, raspberries, apple and pear trees, carrots, cabbages, rhubarb and so on. Most neighbours had at least a few fruit trees even if they didn’t bother growing their own vegetables.
I think this was partially a hangover from the second world war and the rationing that prevailed in England during the late forties and early fifties. In fact growing your own vegetables in the cities was a major part of the UK’s food supply strategy during the second world war (and also used in the US from memory).
I remember the vegetable growing gradually petered out during the late sixties and when we moved house in the early Seventies was never re-established.
Growing your own food has started to become more common again. I think the main reasons people are:
- Concerned about modern farming and food processing practices and want the assurance of knowing what actually went into their food.
- Concerned about the security and cost of food supplies in the future.
Keeping chickens at home is part of this trend an doften mentioned as part of permaculture practices. Chickens do excellent work in fertilising the garden and removing pests from it and they produce eggs on top of all that - what a great deal!
Suggested Actions:
- Take an inventory of your home environment and what you can grow in the space you have. You can grow a useful amount of vegetables on a balcony and you can largely feed a family of 4 by intensively farming 120 sq m.
- Learn about gardening and food growing (permaculture is useful to learn because it is based on self sustaining systems which wil be important in future/
- Research what food trees grow well in your area and plant those first (because they take time to reach maturity).
- Consider keeping small, food oriented animals - chickens are just one example.
Planning For The Future
Filed Under Survival | Comments Off
Despite media coverage and numerous national and global forums expressing concern about climate change etc, environmental damage is still accelerating - it is not under control - as consumption grows and the global population increases.
And Yes the challenge of doing enough about it to make a useful difference is enormous because the bottom line is there are too many people on the planet living an unsustainable lifestyle. It’s just simple maths really - 6.5 billion people consuming more than the planet can sustainably provide.
In all probability, we don’t have much time left as a civilisation to change our ways - most likely a lot less than a generation. Fundamentally, the shift in thinking and beliefs - at a personal, community, regional, corporate, national and global level - has to be something like:
1. The current default thinking of "is what I’m doing now profitable or gratifying for me", has to change to "is it sustainable for the community?"
2. The current default thinking of "how can I secure control of this resource to my own advantage" has to change to "how can this resource be shared effectively?"
Both examples represent massive shifts in current thinking, government policy and human behavior. Is such a change possible? Well of course anything is possible, but it really doesn’t look very probable at this point. The forces to keep on living as we have been accustomed to are enormous.
Basically, the economic underpinnings of society as we know it is based on the assumption of growth - in people, houses, cars, consumption in all its forms, raw material inputs, waste output etc etc.
The catch is this economic model places very little value on the planetary resources - environment and and eco systems that support the economy and ultimately life itself.
A common mindset is "well my neighbors, my boss, the government, India, China, the US etc etc are not doing anything, so what difference can I make and why should I bother?"
As mentioned above, we need a massive change in our behavior and priorities for our current civilisation to survive and that change has to start with me and you, right here, right now.
So don’t say to yourself "what difference is me switching off onelight bulb going to make". The best way to look at is to say to yourself "Well if me and another hundred, or thousand, or million or 10 million people all do it, it will make a difference.
So like any task we take on, begin with the first, small step and the belief that we can find a way to make a worthwhile difference. Focus on what you can do now, today or tomorow and not what you can’t and make plans for a future lifestyle that probably won’t look at all like the current western one.