Grow Your Own and Grow

This is a follow up to one of the comments on "I Ain't Buying It" from yesterday.

Anon at 3:09 PM said:

Just another thought on joblessness to build on what JC says....

I woke up this morning thinking about the thousands of people losing their jobs in the auto market particularly & wondered to myself; what can s/he do now for work... s/he now has to jump through their hoops or making us think inside the box that "they've" created, in our minds. what would I do in their position... I think I'd become a FARMER. There's nothing telling me that I can't turn my backyard, in my house, that I'm debted to pay off, & turn it into a kind of local community vegetable farm....

I know it sounds kind of funny, but it just might work... Use their "laws" against them... maybe even their tax-breaks. A community farmer of sorts.

That's one of my back-up plans!!

Over at Deconsumption Steven Lagavulin linked to my post along with this:

More Food for Thought from Village Blog

Village Blog has its promised interview with permaculture farmer Joe Polaischer. I had linked to a more summary article there a little over a week ago....through anecdotal stories Polaischer hinted that people in shanty-towns can grow a veritable feast of food, but that the well-off who suddenly find themselves destitute generally must live off "the kindness of strangers"....

It's short and worth the read because it sheds a little bit of light on what happens when society breaks down.

So Joe Polaischer visits this family and here's some of what he saw:

The family said; ‘Sit down and eat with us, this is our food’, The table was full of delicious stuff and I said; ‘Where did you get this? You shouldn’t have spent your precious money on me’, and I felt really bad and they said; ‘What? This is our food – OUR food, we grow it’, and I said; ‘No way!’ and then they took me into the courtyard and showed me how they intensively grow food there.

You know they had these guinea pigs up in cages (and rabbits and pigeons), on the wall – their droppings were immediately going into containers like car tires [which were] full of vegetables – they had all sorts of climbers and beans and so on, squash, all over the place in the courtyard. And the whole courtyard was full of food - they even had fish – Filopia* – which is bit of pig in the water, this fish, but it tastes delicious and the chickens were on top of the 200-litre barrels of water and the chicken droppings went in there and the Filopia was eating it underneath. So a total cyclic system and these people were actually not hungry and I got a real good… ahh, learning there seeing how you can actually grow food in the city

Aaron How big was the courtyard?

Joe Not big if I recall rightly, perhaps maybe 30 square metres or so but every space was used for food growing.

30 square metres in a barrio in Lima, Peru. That ain't much is it? No supermarket, no credit, no waiting in line, no hassle on the way there. You can sell the surplus. Have a parttime job and survive. Be able to spend more time with your family, your kids. And if it all does come crashing down? Hey! You can teach others. We could get back to being real communities again. With real people. Like, "I ain't buying it. I'm growing it." Talk about grassroots.

Don't know where to start? Check out this site. Or google permaculture.