4 ms·

While you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backya

While you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.

Auracle 5y ago
I live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents. The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does. Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Permaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly. Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.
asdff 5y ago
It takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall. The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce. Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.

While you can’t make industrial quality steel in your backyard, most households could make food that is better than “industrial” quality produce in their backyard.

Auracle 5y ago

I live in an area where most people garden - including my wife and both of our sets of parents. The produce is undeniably better, but it’s still not an efficient use of most professional’s time. If you’re particularly poor or retired then it absolutely does. Fruit trees are more expensive in the beginning, but they need less overall time put in to them for what you get out. They’d be a good choice for most people with a yard.

cwkoss 5y ago
Permaculture techniques like no-dig cultivation, perennial plants, and frequent mulching can reduce the amount of labor needed to yield valuable and nutritionally dense produce greatly. Everyone with a yard with trees that need occasional pruning and a 4'x4' space for a compost pile can buy a ~$120 electric chipper and make their own composted mulch and replace the majority of soil amendments the home gardener uses.

asdff 5y ago

It takes a lot of labor even just to maintain my few plants and keep up with pests/drought/storms/nutrient deficiencies. The pests are such an issue. Anytime you grow anything in quantity, you are entering this unbalanced thermodynamic state and the environment will respond by creating an equilibrium. In other words more pests find more food and more of their offspring survive and there are more pests overall. The farmer has historically and even today solved this with scale. Suppose they manage to kill 95% of the pests and the remaining continue to eat out the crop all season, which is fine because there is enough crop where some loss from pests are tolerated. Meanwhile in my case and in the personal garden scale, one pest can ruin your entire crop. I've had one rat come over and eat all my produce in two nights. Then after that they marched right next door to my neighbor's garden and ate most of their produce. Gardening is a fun and rewarding hobby, but make no mistake that it takes a ton of labor, and you are going to have a hard time turning a backyard garden or a community garden plot into a reliable enough food source to actually consistently feed yourself. Starving to death is not so uncommon even among the old fronteirspeople who knew a thing or two about what they were doing about homesteading.