People saying that you need to garden, that your back yard garden will allow you to be self-sustaining and even feed other people, that you can do a full time job while having this self-sustaining garden, that you can do this gardening while disabled:
Wildly fucking unhinged. Cartoon fantasy shit.
Wildly fucking unhinged. Cartoon fantasy shit.
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https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2024/10/man-fulfils-dream-by-paddling-pumpkin-boat-record-73-km-down-us-river
Look up the calories a human needs each day to not die.
Look up how much gardening you need to do to get that many calories.
To be able to self sufficiently garden with a bad back or otherwise disabled.
It's a fetish for people with enormous throbbing erections from imagining big mommy milker tradwife "taking care of the chickens" before morning gym.
During the pandemic, I used a Click & Grow to grow romaine lettuce and bell peppers.
I grew enough for exactly one salad.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0883292717301737
The only thing that ever grows in abundance is zucchini and because of that everyone now hates it.
Also, egg production stops in the winter.
People look at history and see liberty gardens and door to door sales and the familiarity is reassuring.
I’m very, very happy I don’t have to do any of that.
Know what happens to people in places where that's the norm? A lot of them starve to death from famine
However, my g-mas only had 3 kids each and Mom just had 2. And I am living their fantasy as a childfree spinster. 😁
There are no wide-sweeping theories about history that are always 100% true. But one that gets close is that farming sucks ass and every society that does it has tried to find a way to make someone else do it for them.
Sometimes I have good luck with tomatoes but not this year
The ground gets too hot in sunlight to keep from killing most food crops, and if the pots are too close to a building, everything will be contaminated with lead after the first rainfall.
It's definitely nice to have and they are fit as heck because of it but it's far from enough to live only of that
Aside from my ADHD ass not being built for gardening while having to work and care for myself, I don’t have a fire escape anymore. When I did back in The Bronx, I would’ve been paying out the ass to feed pigeons with that bucket plus FDNY fines
-building a compost setup (3 side-by-side bins of at least 1 cubic yard each - smaller and it won't get hot enough)
-Chipdrop for lots of free rot-able material
-Growing for thrift: tomatoes, greens, berries, tree fruit
-Growing for calories: potato, apple, squash, carrot
1) lives alone
2) is fully able-bodied
3) has a well-paying tech job to afford all the soil suppliments
4) STILL buys meat, bread, canned goods & pet food from the grocery.
The mice that tunneled under the garden bed and found them really appreciated the feast that I grew for them. So many half-eaten spuds thrown away.
when I was living in a squat in the middle of a city I grew potatoes in a basement window in a cardboard box. using shredded newspapers and dirt stolen from the park.
I got a few meals out of it -
there's ways to do this stuff to help along when you're poor. having land is not a thing for most people. you can't live on cardboard box potatoes.
if you got land you better grow stuff people can eat and you better share it all.
being away from civilization appeals to these types but it's a bad strategy for actual survival.
you gonna need a hospital eventually.
If you're a backyard gardener, the climate/weather doesn't care about your plans.
We successfully grew two pumpkins a few years back, but none since.
Also, it requires more time and knowledge than I think most expect. Some luck as well (good weather, no animal visiting the buffet)
It takes several years of growing carrots before you can actually harvest them.
I got like 5 tiny carrots, absolutely delicious though.
You got too much sun
You didn’t get enough soluble
Repeat w too much or not enough water 🤦🏻♀️
“Not wildly impossible” fuckin lol
Household composting mitigates remediation costs.
What is your idea for a solution?
If I want plentiful fresh produce, my best option would be a family share in a CSA. Not available here.🤷♀️
(I have a very small amount of land. It does not have the sun required for tomatoes since the tree next door got taller.)
Personally i am chasing that real juicey tomato flavour
Nice haul btw :)
I tried to grow an herb garden. And they died. Every. Last. Plant.
Inevitably, I fail to tend to the garden, the garden dies, and I mourn the garden with my therapist. Another $200 gone.
Fuck that noise.
Learning how food grows is a humbling experience, and everyone should learn the lessons from it. BUT not everyone needs to be doing it
they were also producing plenty of wheat, they just weren’t allowed to KEEP it, it was all exported
but, pre-blight, potatoes and a milk cow kept a lot of families fed on not much more than that
And individual "farmers" trying for self sufficiency have a problem when they need the Doctor, or a Teacher and he/she is frantically digging their own garden to survive.
I know some people who got pretty good yields out of potato barrel plantings. Did they grow a year’s worth of food in their barrel? Hell to the no.