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By comrade in crisis, I grew up with a family and extended family putting blood sweat and tears into food gardens every summer my whole life. They managed to grow enough to supplement everyone's diets most years. But they still needed groceries. And some years things went to shit when weather or pests or something else went wrong. And it was never, ever easy. So, I'm sorry. I call bullshit.
Depends on the goal.
Being totally independent is hard. Having a few strategic plants isn't that bad.
No, you aren't going to live off your casual garden, but you can have a bit of lettuce or a few other easy leafy vegetables around. You can't go all in on lots of salads, but you can at least have a lettuce leaf for a sandwich if you can't get it from the store.
It's not a bad situation for things like a sandwich topping or garnish here and there.
A few pots on a patio occasionally watered can be pretty solid. Yes you still need the grocery store, but maybe you can skip lettuce from the grocery store and still have it for light usage.
All it took was a single record-heat day to wipe out my coworkers flowers.
My parents installed nets to guard their garden for hail a couple years ago after a bad storm
I don't think humans are supposed to eat flowers.
Technically, you can eat some flowers. Like figs and squash flowers.
Nonetheless, growing flowers works off the same principle as growing other plants. Proper conditions are needed for success.
Speak for yourself, pal
I will eat this rose and love it!
No, I won't remove the thorns!
No, YOUR MOUTH is bleeding!
Depend, there is the easy way, then there is the hard way. Ever pick up an instrument and try to play it for the first time? Same with growing food.
I grow food, provided you have land and time, its so fucking easy. You put compost down, add seeds, add mulch, water deeply when the ground dries out. I use a hose timer so I can turn it on and walk away. None of this is rocket science, people way over think their gardens, plants are resilient.
Well I guess I'm just a complete idiot then.
I don't think you're an idiot i think you're likely distracted. The world is trying to sell you something. Buy this amendment, buy this tool, buy my guide, use this 1 neat trick, use my hack no one has thought of. People have been planting food for at least 10000 years. When people thought the sun was literally god and knew nothing of soil microbiology or npk. Stop over thinking it and stick to the basics. After addressing the basics search for simple solutions to problems that come your way. Most plants grow themselves, they are biologically adapted to survival.
Start by growing easy things that need no maintenance and are native to your area or grow in your climate. If you're in a northern climate you can literally stick raspberry plants and/or wild or ever bearing strawberries in the ground and 2-3 years later you will have a full berry patch with 0 effort, they spread and grow themselves. Throw food bearing bushes and trees in the ground and water and feed them here and there the first season and they will pay dividends for the next 20-30 years. Plant 3 chive plants and you will never need to buy them in spring/summer again. They come back every year without any maintenance. There are so many things you can just plant and let exist, start there.
So happy for you that you have the things that make that easy. Good climate, no pests or deer or rabbits or crows, or robins or other birds, considerate neighbours, access to water for irrigation all year long, and apparently no issues with weeds eh? And lots of access to cheap, safe compost too huh? Oh and the tools (and storage!) to spread compost, aerate soil, weed (wait you dont get weeds!), and manage things like planter beds or poles or netting or trellises or tomatoes cages? And you grow enough that you meaningfully cut down on groceries huh? What a lucky duck.
Certainly some of the things you listed can present challenges, but I really think our society mythologises planting and farming and that was really my point, which I made poorly because I was being too flippant.
We act like producing food is an 80 hour a week job for only the smartest green thumbs when it doesn't even take a fraction of that time and takes an accessible amount of skill.
Provided you're privileged enough to have access to 1/4 - 1/2 acre of sunny land, you could grow a decent portion of your food for under 10 hrs a week. I know people who do.
Certainly expanding to that size takes some time prepping new beds, but maintaining existing beds and growing food in them is really not that much work. I maintain about 1500 sq/ft of food garden right now and outside of 5-15 hours of early spring prep I spend 1-2 hours a week in the garden through most of the actual growing season, and that's probably an over estimation. Each season I expand a manageable amount, and that's really the most time consuming because I am hand terracing a hill, 1 row each year. Certainly there is work, but acting like its super hard is just silly. I spend most of my time doing anything but gardening.
Honestly, maybe you're serious. And maybe you're a nice person and you just don't get how what you're saying comes off. But you just put "hand terracing a hill" in the same paragraph where you then said that acting like gardening is hard is silly.
Maybe for the person who has the knowledge, skills, abilities, and resources to successfully hand terrace a hill it isn't that hard? I'm sure LeBron James doesnt find layups that hard either.
Regardless of how you meant it, the comment comes off with strong Lucille Bluth vibes.
He specifically listed that activity as one of those rare time consuming parts.
Broadly there is a lot the common person assumes absolutely beyond their capability and never tries. People should at least be encouraged that DIY is worth a shot to see if it can work. Big business loves a populace that views doing anything for themselves as a lost cause, good for people to have a least a little familiarity with things to keep that perspective balanced.
I'd probably start smaller, a handful of leafy plants on a patio or something. Very cheap, easy, and low stakes. You won't replace your diet with independent farming, but at least the general concept won't seem impossibly out of reach.
I wasn't claiming hand terracing a hill was easy, the only thing I claimed was easy was growing food. Terracing a hill isn't a requirement for everyone. Shit, its not even for me, its just where I wanted the garden. You know what is hard? My fucking job, that I work at to make money to buy food. I'd much rather keep expanding my garden bit by bit and grow something that is comparatively free, than spend more of my life working for someone else. A fair amount of the crops I'm adding are take care of themselves crops. Raspberries, blueberries, hazelnuts, skirret, chives, rhubarb, Egyptian walking onions, mint, thyme, parsley, etc. all basically take care of themselves once in the ground.
Everything I do to create comparatively easier parallel systems to separate myself out of a broken evil system makes my life much easier. It relieves mental stress and brings me peace. In my opinion people equate doing less in the short term as easy, but life isn't that simple. Gardening is the easiest route in my life. I am very lazy. Its more work and mental load to give my time to someone else in a broken system. Then to also spend my time in a grocery aisle wondering just how poor quality the food I'm eating is. Gardening is a relief to the pressure of a dying society, its the easiest route in a shit world.
While a bad example, because some things were initially potentially difficult for your average person, I just switched everything to Linux, graphene os, and a home server with used parts on hand. It ultimately reduced mental load and made my life easier. Sometimes the easiest route in life is adding a little work on the front end. Using Linux and graphene greatly reduced my mental load. I rarely have to consider what I'm interacting with because I eliminated 80% of the programs that were spying on me and selling my data. I also spend less time trying to fix something Microsoft broke.
My initial point was admittedly clumsy and flippant. But I really think people obfuscate how difficult gardening is. Life is difficult, growing things, is comparatively easy. Plants grow with very little interaction from you. Shit, they grow in the wild without your help. Your input is best spent protecting the plant and letting it do it's thing outside of a drought. To me that's easy, something anyone with access to land and an able body can do. Only 1%-3% of people can do my technical job, but 100% of able bodied people with land can garden.
LOL, you make gardening seem like work when it is more of a lifestyle. I have a dog, gun flash tape and fence for critters, carry a few cans of water when it doesn't rain, and rarely weed much - never till or plow. My main garden equipment is a hoe, a round point shovel and a five-tine fork for spreading mulch the old discarded hay bales make great feertilized as they decompose into the sand. I still buy produce from the store in off-season but sell and give away a lot of produce. You should really read books by Ruth Stout and Masanobu Fukuoka.
My first year, I planted zuchini and it grew like crazy. Unfortunately so did the beetles that ate it. Every morning I went out to water it, and they'd scatter. I didn't want to use pesticide on my food, so I waged a war spraying the hose with one hand and crushing them with the other. I have a bad back, so that was fun. The next year I added cantaloupe, ready for the same song and dance. Between the bugs and the heat, I managed to harvest one single zuchini before they ate what hadn't shriveled up under the sun. The year after that, I tried onions. They overtook the flower bed and the root system is weedlike. I think I put too many, too close together. This year I've been in too much pain and its been too hot, so I haven't even tried. That was all at my parents place. My apartment doesn't have much patio space, so it gets partial sun. I've tried to raise tomatoes, carrots, zuchini and anything that sprouts from my compost. Everything starts out ok but by a month the sun has shifted and doesn't hit the space the same the rest of the summer.
I understand if I had better land, more time, more sun, and no bugs maybe it would be easy. But you gotta be kidding me.
I've had issues with bugs which has mostly been solved by interplanting everything. Every tomato, pepper, and basil plant is in different parts of the garden with marigolds and other companion plants around. Bugs like monocrops, they tend to have lower pressure when you mix things up. Bugs still get a few things, but they are a lot less focused than when I grew things in large monocrop beds. The bad back makes it hard though, planting can be hard on your back.
It sounds like you have quite a lot of expertise most people don't have, which is probably why you find growing food relatively easy and many don't. It's not just needing the weekly time to plant and maintain the land, or needing to have good land in the first place, that stops people, it's also not having time to build up that expertise.
Building up expertise... you mean like watch any of the thousands of accessible YouTube videos that say to do exactly this. I'm an amateur in the garden, watching a video to solve a simple problem being called expertise feels like you're giving it more weight than it needs. We have much of the knowledge of human history at our fingertips, no expertise needed.