This mornings npr news included a piece about cities (maine I think) which are now allowing people to raise up to six hens (no roosters) within city limits.
--- On Sun, 2/22/09, Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:
From: Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> Subject: [Livingontheland] One way to cope? Grow your own To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org Date: Sunday, February 22, 2009, 6:32 PM
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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