For the love of God, if I see one more ',grow your own food' hot take.
Sure, for occasional fresh herbs or a few veggies.
Nobody is growing to their entire caloric intake in an apartment or on a balcony.
Sure, for occasional fresh herbs or a few veggies.
Nobody is growing to their entire caloric intake in an apartment or on a balcony.
Comments
Grow YOUR OWN food is not the solution. Because you're doing alone. With limited resources.
Re-read what I said.
Just use the land to build more apartments closer to the center, you offset SO much travel emissions.
Not sustainable. It is fun! It’s enjoyable. But not really a means of sustaining life for most people.
we fill in each other's gaps.
And if you live in like...Alaska you're fucked.
GROW YOUR OWN food is a glib & privileged take.
Like you said it requires land but also it takes a ton of storage area
Here in the real world, an entire long English cucumber plant was devoured by slugs and the strawberries set about 2 fruit a year, which the squirrels enjoy.
"El gazpacho es una ensalada batida con varios ingredientes como aceite de oliva, vinagre, agua, hortalizas crudas, generalmente tomates, pepinos, pimientos y ajo"
That's accepting the regional varieties of it.
Potatoes can expect 10mil Cal/acre/yr
Manually tilling, planting, weeding, etc will need 3500 Cal/day per man, or 1.3mil/man/year.
Accounting for inevitable waste, you'll need about a quarter acre minimum, and complete dedication.
yeah I get the Baker Creek Seed Catalog too but millet and tsatsoi ain’t going to save us
https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/comments/1hvg1me/another_baker_creek_thread/?chainedPosts=t3_j1kqfp
Get your own damn chicken and take Ivermectin if you’re paranoid about “bird” flu. Jonathan Swift knew some serious stuff. Anglo Saxons have modest proposals that anyone who speaks English, god’s language of course, can understand. IYKYK. 😜
My dad comes from a family of nine. I can't imagine trying to raise and grow enough food for that many.
Then says you have to water the straw *every day for 2 weeks* to get it to start composting, plant when mushrooms sprout from the sides and slack off to every other day until they take then…
the deer eat them.
These hobby gardeners concern trolling people are a plague. TY for this post.
Those are crops that have been largely mechanised in the planting and harvesting.
Between establishment costs, tools and garden prep, plant failures, pests, seasonal oversupply and undersupply, wastage from lack of storage space, etc.
Or I can buy a bag of carrots for less than $2.
The closest I’ve ever come to saving money gardening was that, for the handful of years I meant to keep a few herb plants alive, I saved money on those specific herbs…but even then, I couldn’t grow enough to never have to buy any from the store!
Me: *decides to make a dish involving 30 basil leaves*
Me:
My 1st allotment (in Coventry) was shared with another person and even then was large compared to most plots near where I live now in Glasgow.
( I say this as I prepare 2dz seeds for germination 2day😉)
I do this all from my living room.
It is a labor of love, tho.
One cannot live off basil and spinach alone.
And like hell can I have apartment chickens with two cats!
The homegrown do taste way better though.
Anyone who thinks growing your own food is easy has never tried it.
your hands get beat up, cut up and frostbit. your face dries out.
it's all rich kids putting on a show, it's not real.
grow things starting where you are with what you got. even one thing is ok
Hens are great for eggs, but they require feed and housing, and foxes and other predators are a constant threat
It's nice to grow stuff to supplement your diet but impossible to grow everything
It will grow again after cutting but you’ll have a salad in 6 more weeks
NOW you tell me!
I have a sizeable food forest and vegetable garden and you will never see me claiming I'm "growing my own food"
They're either going to starve or they're going to go out and buy some groceries.
All the inputs (soil amendments, NPK, seeds, etc.), tools, and canning supplies come from stores... And I guess we're assuming the water comes from a well and the stove is powered by wood?
plus big ag
can't forget big ag.
There is also “The Wartime Farm,” a similar series but with historians instead of a family. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzxOMFunsLMAxcgrHUMd1ODFuaffLbSh&si=3jdCHMr_SMYn_r1E
It's not easy to grow enough food for a year for a family of two. We manage to grow enough to last us until about February, but that's a long stretch until the next real crop comes in.
and I know I'm REALLY lucky to be where I am. This doesn't work for everyone.
But how plausible are they really? especially in urban areas where land is such a premium.
Helping our neighbors!
People see problems and want solutions.
That some problems aren't solvable isn't a terribly comforting notion, and the problem you're talking about is in that category.
Society arriving at a point of "subsistence farm or die" is not a problem an individual is gonna be able to solve.
Much of my childhood was “haul wood, stack wood, split wood, haul wood again, stack wood again, haul wood AGAIN, stack wood AGAIN, repeat” (and Dad cut the wood.)
Even hunting is going to be difficult with how Bird Flu is spreading.
Even cats and dogs aren't safe.
If was as easy as everyone thinks, I wouldn’t get so many questions constantly
I am a master gardener and I donate food to food shelves through a big team. It’s not practical for the folks in my community to have the means to grow much. It’s delusional oversimplification.
I work to enable those who have the interest to garden, and to lower any barriers to entry.
I care deeply about this and I have some experience
https://youtu.be/-Sy0C55ryXc?si=Vnze2bBA_gYvvJaD
I'm starting a windowsill herb garden & getting better at making bread, but otherwise I'm focusing on heavily stocking up the pantry.
Good luck with that!
There are 640 acres in a square mile, so right off the bat 2.25 acres per person…
Not allowing for buildings, roads, parking lots, what have you.
It sucks, having the space to grow food is a privilege
People don’t realize how dependent we are on for farming.
Otherwise, it’s back to hunting and gathering .
https://www.freightfarms.com/greenery-s
(Of course, this is industry - and has its drawbacks, even if distributed. Supplies & maintenance for instance...)
And in some years Summer floods wrecked root veggie harvests.
2024 was a good year, but in 2023 90% of the crop was lost,
I was heartbroken and not only lost my whole crop, but it was too late to replant. 😭😭😭
Step 1: Grow just enough wheat on your balcony to make one loaf of bread.
Step 2: Sprinkle breadcrumbs on balcony.
Step 3: Capture pigeons feasting on your sourdough.
Step 4: Set up balcony pigeon farm.
Step 5: Feast upon your cultivated flying rats!
Why did folks abandon keeping dovecotes? I mean, one might want quail for easy little-egg layers.
Pigeons are pretty clean birds.
I bet you have more disease than a pigeon.
If you're a pigeon, you have to tell us.
Farming is full-time labor!
Probably easier to just get a part time job and buy it.
Lol wait till they dig their burrows tho.
A few habanero peppers, some bell peppers, some salad leaves and enough tomatoes to keep a tomato factory going for 6 months 😂
Not sure how that happened.
But lots of luck to you
Good luck
Believing this is even close to feasible is a form of innumeracy.
How do I grow my own HIV meds?
Coca-Cola schemes on, the people starve, guaranteed.
People think you just throw some seeds and compost waste. Done deal.
Lol.
It always seems easy, until you try to do it!
Always something
I have no time, and extreme impatience.
Plus, botany is not that simple.
My CSA is paid for the year in one payment which is tough, but we save on groceries overall with it. & You can let them know if you need help paying. worth checking!
That's why we have big farms and they hire people to pick that food, process that meat. Those same people who're being deported 😠
I like this take better: donate to the food bank. They can use cash a lot more than they can use an expired can of deviled ham.
Fish
Raise chickens
Garden
If you choose apartment life, you’re stuck at the mercy of grocery conglomerates
READ. WHAT. SHE. WROTE.
It’s not as simple as you are trying to make it out to be. It’s very very very hard to be 100% self sustaining.
I do have experience with all of these practices… not an expert but experience 😚
I have experience with all of these food methods, and I do not think it’s a practical solution.
Should the hunter-gardeners kill the rest, or just leave them to die off?
2. Due to the amount of lead in the soil around my house, we are told NOT to grow food here.
(you can put em on a heat mat and spray them with water every few days to stop them from dropping leaves though)
they'll make a few lemons but it takes time
Had shelving everywhere as storage for jars.
Onions and garlic braids hung in his shop out back.
All exposed dirt used.
Grandma had a grape arch she tended.
He picked up two bare lots in the 30's or 40's while he was working construction. He built 3/4 of the houses in the new town. Built his house out of scrap wood from job sites or other means of procurement.
Lived in a tent while building it.
Grandpa could build. That house was solid. Kitchen floor made out of railroad ties.
As I said, this was his garden for two people. Grandma gave canned food as gifts too. Jellys, etc.
He was a carpenter, fisherman, hunter, etc. He never bought meat, he's go in the hills and find it. Always had salmon and rainbow trout in the freezer.
This was great depression mindset.
Apparently I've been wrong to use all the systems our society has created my entire life, but the effing telecom with billion dollar profits NEEDS our collecting funds to continue to exist.