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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] One way to cope? Grow your own
  • Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:32:32 -0700


One way to cope? Grow your own
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-dre
her_0222edi.State.Edition1.1e03499.html
04:07 PM CST on Friday, February 20, 2009

It's not that people in her office aren't worried about layoffs, the woman
told me. It's that they've moved from fear to panic to grim resignation.
This way to the pink slips, ladies and gentlemen.

Sitting quietly waiting for your number to be called is one way to deal
with the economic crisis. But it's hardly the best way. Wouldn't you really
rather plant a garden?

My wife is the practical gardener in our family; I'm the one who spends his
days poring over economic forecasts, furrowing my brow and trying to make
sense of the gathering storm. The other day she was out back tranquilly
harvesting winter greens from one of her raised beds; I was in the kitchen
listening to a dreary economic podcast. I watched her out the back window,
then looked in on the seedlings she's cultivating under a grow lamp, next
to a small brooder that's home to four baby chicks she's raising, and
thought: Score one for agrarian serenity in the face of collapse anxiety.

Last summer's fuel crisis seeded the popular culture with talk of reviving
Victory Gardens, which helped feed America during World War II. Now that
the economy has stumbled into the composter, there's even more incentive to
make your back yard do something more than look good this spring and
summer.

Unless you're an expert gardener, discard the illusion that you'll be able
to support your household on what you can grow on your little urban patch.
The best most of us will be able to do is to supplement what we buy at the
grocery store – at least, in the short run.

Russian émigré writer Dmitry Orlov, though, notes in his recent book,
Reinventing Collapse, that in the face of Soviet-era agricultural collapse
and mass poverty, "kitchen gardens turned out to be lifesavers." It would
be unwise to assume we Americans will never need kitchen gardens.

It also would be unwise to assume that all you need to do is throw a few
seeds into the ground and wait for the harvest. Trial and error is a master
teacher. Better to acquire those skills now, while you have the luxury of
making mistakes.

We haven't seen economic uncertainty like this since the Great Depression,
when gardening, and the skills it required, was far more common in our
country. When U.S. District Judge Harold Barefoot Sanders died last year at
83, The New York Times remarked that he was born "in a Dallas young enough
for little H.B. to raise chickens in the back yard." Well, my kids are
doing so today in our back yard; it's legal to have hens in Dallas, but not
roosters.

Lu Ann Shank helps with an urban 4-H club in East Dallas and oversees her
three children's backyard chicken mini-ranch.

"My kids think that pinto beans got picked up in a baggie somewhere and a
label placed on them," Shank told me. "I think it's real important to show
my kids where their food comes from and that there's an art and a science
to getting to it."

Besides, she adds, "after 9/11, when everything came to a grinding halt, I
looked out in my back yard and thought, 'I can always feed my family.' "

If you have skills in gardening and animal husbandry, however rudimentary,
you don't feel helpless in the face of growing uncertainty. My 74-year-old
father, who grew up in the country during the Great Depression, is fairly
sanguine about the near future. "We lived off our gardens back then," he
says. "My generation knows how to do that."

Could a new generation of Americans, raised in a wealthy, consumerist
society, be ready to rediscover the gift of agrarian self-sufficiency?
Possibly. One problem for us city dwellers is zoning restrictions put in
place over the years stand in the way.

"Can you have chickens in University Park?" a UP chatelaine asked me last
week. Nope. City code forbids fowl. There are patchwork zoning laws all
limiting or denying the possibility of micro-agriculture and
self-sufficiency.

Writes agrarian activist Sharon Astyk on her must-read blog
(www.sharonastyk.com): "In some cases, these laws were instituted for
fairly good reasons, [but] in many cases, for bad ones that associate such
activities with poverty."

Times change, and fashions change. In East Dallas, it's cool, not trashy,
to have chickens. Depression chic ought to destigmatize both frontyard
gardening and backyard animal husbandry.

Kitchen gardens (and chicken coops) will never substitute for congressional
measures to address urgent economic needs. But we won't have the
micro-scale urban agriculture we need to help us through hard times,
materially and psychologically, until and unless we have local political
action to change outdated zoning.

Urban agrarians unite! Hope sprouts this gloomy economic spring. Peeps,
too.






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