“In backyard farming, your not only selling the veggies, your selling the experience.” Charlie Radoslovich of Rad Urban Farmers
In the US alone, there’s 50,000 square miles of lawns.
That’s obviously a terrible waste of a very valuable resource.
But it gets worse, we spend over $30 billion a year landscaping those yards.
We’re not only wasting it, we’re paying to waste it. Wow!
One big reason a home’s yard is so valuable is due to its proximity.
It’s a growing space next to where you live. A place you see every day. An accessible space.
That means it is one of the best places in the world for your food garden. It’s so close, it integrates growing food into your life (like the garden above, grown by Rad Urban Farmers).
That integration gives you a measure of independence, an appreciation of what good food consists of (given how artificial and engineered so much of what we eat today is, that’s a VERY good thing), and a way to impart that experience to your kids.
Of course, since most people in the developed world don’t know how to grow food anymore and many of the methods and tools used to grow high quality food are still being developed, we are going to need to some help.
One great way to do that is to join a local foodscaping program.
This type of program is like a food subscription at a CSA. However, in this program, the farmer comes to you. He/she converts your yard into a high performance garden and teaches you how to garden it successfully.
I think that if we are smart, we’ll be spending more money on foodscaping in ten years than landscaping. If so, good food will be available everywhere.
Keep thinking resiliently, take advantage of every setback. Turn it into an opportunity!
John Robb
PS: What’s amazing to me is that we’re still learning new and better ways to grow healthy, delicious food locally. That’s one of the reasons I started the resilient communities newsletter and research service. My job is to find these methods/tools and get them out to you as soon as possible.
PPS: The Wednesday Resilient Strategies call is with Doug Kalmer (1PM EST). He’s got quite a few DIY solar projects under his belt. Let’s find out what he’s learned.
PPPS: When the GMO food bubble pops, you are going to wish you had a garden. So, get it early and use it as much as you can.
