< HOME  Monday, January 30, 2006

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.

6 Comments:

At Monday, January 30, 2006, Blogger qrswave said...

Excellent follow up. Chimes right in with my post How do you spell INDEPENDENCE?

But, if you plan on growing everything you need in your own backyard, you don't even need money.

 
At Monday, January 30, 2006, Blogger yusuf chun said...

right q, maybe i should've wrote "have a part time job and live large" :)

thx for the link morph

 
At Monday, January 30, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello guys. I read this story and just HAD to post what happened!

For a little background, I am the IT Manager for a company in the USA, and our network runs a content filter or "censorship device" as I like to call it. Because we a are a smaller company we outsource the maintenance of this database to SonicWall. I tried to visit the site: oaec.org linked to by your story and i got a "Content Blocked" message. I was stunned. How could this site be blocked. Here are the categories we have this system block:

1. Violence/Hate/Racism
2. Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit
3. Nudism
4. Pornography
5. Weapons
6. Adult/Mature Content
7. Cult/Occult
8. Drugs/Illegal Drugs
9. Not Blocked
10. Sex Education
11. Gambling
12. Alcohol/Tobacco

Now... where would that site fall into one of these categories? I have no idea. But I do know that I am going to find a different provider to administer our filtering service.

(Note that I would get rid of the filtering service entirely but that certain higher-ups would not allow that)

Anyway keep up the great work you guys!

 
At Monday, January 30, 2006, Blogger yusuf chun said...

maybe 5 and 7? :)
oh 9 too

 
At Tuesday, January 31, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

haha #9 is "illegal or questionable content" and I don't have that one enabled. Would that site really fall under the occult or weapons? ah well.

 
At Tuesday, January 31, 2006, Blogger AJ said...

JC,

Another excellent post.
I had a little garden in my neck of the woods, but gave up on it, since the soil is very acidy (near the ocean).
Got some great jallapeno peppers! Everthing else (and I had a lot) just tasted like crap.

Some say to put lyme on it, but gotta do more research.
Thanx for the good links also, and others for the comments above.

 

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