Feel everyone should have right to grow vegetable? Please signPETITION
Tanya Greene
7 years ago
last modified: 7 years ago
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Dougl
7 years agoRelated Discussions
Why don't more people grow vegetables?
Comments (82)keepitlow, at first I thought the thing about keeping shoes in your fridge was a joke taken out of context or something like that, but there was a link to the full article and... oh my gosh! You know, when I was in college and lived in a 300 square foot apartment I STILL tried to cook in my tiny kitchen. I had lived in the dorm the year before and was so sick of other people cooking for me and not having that control over my own food. I can't imagine just unplugging your fridge and eating take out all the time. I mean, yes, I do get take out sometimes, and go to restaurants, but if I lived on it... it's so fattening and so expensive! *** macky77, "'My soil won't grow anything and I can't afford or don't have time to build raised beds and buy all the special ingredients you NEED to make super soil.' The most common situations they cite are either living in rental properties with neglected yards or new developments where the topsoil was not replaced after construction." Well, as other people have said, yes, new developments can have awful soil. Bermudagrass sod doesn't take much. I live in a rental house with a neglected yard (at least until I got here). Actually it's kind of interesting to see what's hanging on in a yard where nature has been allowed to take over. I used to have scarlet sage growing in the front (hummingbirds LOVE that stuff) until the Lawn Police ordered us to mow it down, and in the back I have pigeonberry, black-eyed susan, wild sunflowers, and rain lillies growing, along with some other wildflowers I have yet to identify. I betcha the land is actually better off for it rather than being maintained as a Bermudagrass monoculture soaked in herbicides. But anyway, back to having good soil, this goes back to my idea that maybe people think growing veggies is harder than it really is. I live in south-central Texas. The soil here is clay with limestone rocks, and I'm growing stuff right in it. Didn't build any raised beds (don't want to build any permanent structures at a rental house). Potatoes didn't seem to like it, but tomatoes, beans, peppers, squash, etc. don't seem to mind one bit. Digging in it is a big of hard work, but it's better than gonig to the gym. I wonder if the garden media has anything to do with this. You know, TV shows with perfect looking gardens, soil you can dig with your bare hands, etc. I wonder if people actually think that veggies NEED perfect soil to grow. Sure they might grow better in perfect soil, but they can make do with what they've got. You don't have to be Martha Stewart. I see gardening as a partnership between me, the plants, and Nature. That means that I don't have to do ALL the work. Lots of plants grow just fine with no human help at all. Veggie plants have evolved alongside us for a while and now need some help, but I still feel like I'm letting them and Nature do most of the work. When people say they can't grow plants here because it's too hot or dry or we have bad soil or something, I always think of the Hopi and related tribes that lived off their gardens with no modern technology in the DESERT. I don't live in the desert, and I do have modern technology, and I do have the farmer's market and grocery store as a backup, so I think I have it EASY. Actually, it reminds me of something from Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden where she talks about how white people don't know how to plant things right. I forgot specifically what it was she was talking about, but I only wonder what she'd think if she saw our gardens today....See MoreHow much space to grow all of our vegetables?
Comments (18)For a long time now, the answer to how much space is needed to grow a year's food for one person has ranged from 4,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet, and I believe that's fairly accurate if you are engaging in traditional gardening practices. If you put a lot of time and effort into double-digging the ground-level soil and adding a lot of organic matter to it (you also can add a raised bed above the well-prepared grade-level soil), a la the John Jevons biointensive gardening method, you probably could easily grow a year's supply of fruit, veggies, herbs and some grains and some compost crops to enrich and renew your soil, but that is the sort of thing you slowly work your way towards doing and it can take years. The most helpful book I've ever read on raising the most food in the least space is John Jeavon's "How To Raise More Vegetables....." book that I've linked below. For centuries, people around the world have used biointensive gardening to raise more crops in less space. The Square Foot Garden method advocated by Mel is just a really simplified form of that biointensive growing method. I read the book when it first came out and experimented with SFG spacing, but found I had better success with the spacing and growing methods advocated by John Jeavons. When you build an above-ground bed on top of unimproved grade-level soil and fill it with imported soil to do Square Foot Gardening, you just aren't going to get the heavy yields a person will get from better and deeper improvement of the soil. That's because production will be better when a plant can easily send our roots far and wide into good, fertile, friable soil. My garden is slightly smaller than Dorothy's and I plant very intensively in raised beds which really are just wide rows with narrow paths, using deep beds of native soil amended with lots or organic matter on an annual basis and using ordinary organic methods, and I don't even raise all of our food. However, I do raise much of it, and have plenty to freeze, can, dehydrate, ferment and root cellar. We also give away quite a lot of produce. To garden on a large scale, you have to have a lot of space and even then you have to really focus every year on improving the soil. Your yields will only be as great as the soil quality, moisture availablity and weather allow. I don't want for you to be discouraged though. Even in a garden with only 500 square feet you could raise quite a lot of produce and herbs. You just need to grow everything vertically that you can. I raise the all kinds of crops vertically, using trellises, ladders, fences, tomato cages, etc. to direct the growth of the plants upward as much as possible. I even allow my Seminole pumpkins to escape from the garden and climb nearby trees. The more stuff you grow vertically, the higher yield you get per square foot of garden space. Vertically, you can grow pole beans (snaps, limas and shellies), pole snap peas, pole southern peas, tomatoes, peppers (caged or staked), muskmelons and cantaloupes, refrigerator-type watermelons, cucumbers, some winter and summer squash and mini-pumpkins, and even potatoes (in boxes, cages, potato grow bags or bins) and sweet potatoes (with the potatoes in the ground and the foliage climbing a fence, trellis or tomato cage). You can increase yields by interplanting 2 or more veggies together. As the earlier veggie matures, the one that needs a longer period to mature can fill in the space left after the earlier crop is harvested. For example, you can plant radishes in the same rows with carrots. The radishes will sprout and grow more quickly, but after you pull the radishes, the carrots will use the space they vacated. Or, you can interplant root crops with leaf crops like carrots with lettuce. It takes time to learn how to use these kinds of combinations to get the best use of your soil, but the John Jeavons book explains the various options in great detail. In his recession gardening book, Jim Wilson (of Victory Garden South fame) says that he believes a garden has to be at least 500 square feet in order for you to raise enough edible crops to break even/make money when you compare the amount of money spent to grow the garden to the dollar value of the crops raised. Anything less than that is still good, but not a winner economically. I'd agree with that premise, but if you use a lot of fresh herbs and you're growing them instead of raising them, then you could be breaking even/saving enough money that your garden is a good investment even if it is less than 500 square feet. When growing your own food, grow what you really like to eat and grow what makes sense economically. In a small garden, it is hard to economically justify growing potatoes because of the amount of space they use up and because potatoes are pretty inexpensive at the grocery store. Economically, I believe tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, virtually all herbs, asparagus, and pole beans and peas probably give the greatest return economically if raised vertically. If you are able to successfully grow winter and summer squash without losing the plants to pests, they can produce quite a lot per square foot, but they also tend to sprawl and take up a lot of space. However, it isn't all about economics. It also is about quality and flavor. I've never yet bought a potato at the grocery store that tastes as good as one that's home-grown. We all talk about the luscious flavor of a home-grown tomato, but a home-grown potato is just as luscious in its own way. And, as for canning and other forms of food preservation, given the size of your beds at the present time, I don't think you'll be doing much food preservation this summer unless you are preserving everything you raise instead of eating it fresh. A garden the size of yours can supply you with a reasonable amount of fresh produce weekly, but not enough that you'll have a surplus to preserve. I have a very large garden and tend to plan lunch and dinner when I am out harvesting early in the day. Anything I'm harvesting that we won't eat in the next few days, I go ahead and freeze, can, dehydrate, ferment or root cellar, or make plans to share it with a family member or friend. Don't forget that you can raise quite a lot of veggies in containers too, and if you put them on a simple drip irrigation system with a timer, that's about as carefree as gardening can be. Even with a very large garden, I generally plant between 40 and 100 containers per year. I didn't do that last year because I was expecting severe drought and that likely was a pretty good decision, but I missed my containers last year, so I'm bringing them back this year. You also can squeeze in some veggie and herbs into ornamental landscape beds, including the various colors of swiss chard and peppers of all kinds, if those beds are inaccessible to rabbits and other critters. They even have cascading forms of tomatoes, like Tumbling Tom Red and Tumbling Tom Yellow, for example, that you can grow in hanging baskets. My first garden here, which I planted 6 months before we broke ground for the house was two 4' x 8' beds and they produced a surprisingly large amount of produce and a few flowers. Every year after that I added to the garden and I'm not through adding to it yet. I have an expansion plan in place for January and February, Lord willing and if the creek don't rise. A lot of the credit for my improved garden yields goes to the ongoing effort to improve the soil as John Jeavons teaches a person to do, but a lot also goes to my endless quest to raise something vertically. I've even raised 12 to 15 lb pumpkins vertically on a fence by creating fabric slings to support the weight of the pumpkins as they enlarged. I started more simply with small melons, then once I had mastered raising them vertically, moved up to larger melons, then watermelons, then small pumpkins and winter squash, and then larger ones. As your gardening skills progress, you find yourself able to grow in ways you never dreamed were possible. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: How To Grow More Vegetables Than You Thought Possible...See MoreReally?Woman Faces Jail Time For Growing Vegetable Garden
Comments (14)I took a second look at the photo and I can see now that the planter boxes don't cover the entire yard. There appears to be grass between the boxes and the street, and mulch around the boxes. If they zoomed out and got a picture of the entire yard instead of just the boxes, it might not appear so much like a landscape nursery. I still don't think it's pretty, but if the boxes aren't as large as they appear in the picture and are only a fraction of the front yard instead of all of it, it's probably not as bad as the photo makes it look. Like I said, too much is unknown and the media is playing up the sensational angle. Yes, I think people should have the right to grow things on their own land, but I also think people should respect their neighbors' rights as well. The article quotes two neighbors, one for and one against. And that's probably the same reaction they would get if they planted all grass, or all flowers. Can't please everyone. Bottom line for me is what it would do to property values and there is no indication of that in the article....See Morehome from the hospital. feeling okay right now
Comments (48)so you'll be up at u-dub?? been a very long time since we were there...all i remember were the boat-rowers and the university center and then, only a few coffee places...starbucks hadn't taken over the world yet...i do recall a store that sold nothing but fancy rice...wonder if it's still there... look at it this way your drugs will have "attended" one of the best schools in the world......See Morefbx22
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