I’m starting this blog because I have no doubt that food is about to become a huge problem globally – and, yes, I mean in the U.S.A. as well. Stories abound in the news about high food prices, crop shortages, and the flooding in the Midwest that threatens this year’s U.S.harvest, but I was particularly interested in a recent article in the Wall St. Journal about suburban homeowners digging up their yards to install vegetable gardens in response to rising food prices. Just like those old WWII Victory Gardens.
I’ve been planting a vegetable garden in every yard I’ve had since the late 70s. I also acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in Agronomy (the study of crops and soils) and even put a couple of years into grad school before wandering off into other fields. So I have a bit of experience in raising food that might come in handy if things go the way I see them – and I see things getting very difficult, as a combination of Peak Oil, climate change and a burgeoning population permanently changes our way of life and severely stresses our ability to feed ourselves.
Food production will have to become more local – which is as it should be from the point of view of both our health and the health of the planet. We’ll need to have more people growing and storing their own food, and that’s where we run into trouble. All those intrepid folks starting gardens in what was once a prized lawn are finding out that growing food is not just about sticking a few plants in the ground, and waiting for the harvest. Plants often wither and die or just don’t produce well for a variety of reasons, most of which are a complete mystery to the average non-farmer. So I’ll write about starting a garden, and share the knowledge and experience I have gained in nurturing and tending a garden in the hopes that this will be of some help in our fight to heal the planet and ourselves.
However, there is another aspect of life in the modern world that I also want to address here as an important part of a Victory Garden, and that is the spiritual aspect. You can read more about my thoughts on this here, but in a nutshell, I’ll be looking at meditative, magical and shamanic techniques for improving our relationship to the Earth and all the beings that are part of it along with the nuts and bolts gardening information. So in the next post, I’ll look at why, if we have access to some land, we should all have a garden.
