For all you urban gardeners out there. Article is Sydney based cos abc, but still valid. Good balance of ALL the factors involved including the downsides.
“Have you considered hunter-gathering or subsistence farming?”
Modern society is a joke.
Right, what a piss take. Certainly not written from the perspective of a person working 40 to 60 hours a week
If it’s cheaper for anyone to grow their own produce by hand, than it is to buy the same produce from industrialised, mechanised agriculture, everyone is being exploited and price gouged en mass — the entire system is invalid, and deserves to be torn down.
These little helpful guides are only useful if you don’t particularly value your time, or you have an excess of it. The net result over a year for a vege patch is a few dollars a week at most, unless you truly get into it and you have the materials and space and climate to do so.
They might as well post articles saying, “skip that takeaway coffee and make one at home instead, or better yet, make one at work with their resources”.
They’re journalistic filler and that’s all they are.
I’ve been an avid gardener for years. Growing your own veggies costs a bomb for me. Possums. Grasshoppers. Bugs. Mealy bugs. Etc etc. If you’re lucky it might work. For me, no luck. The most expensive veggies I’ve ever had are my own.
By my rough estimate, this year, I spent more than twice as much on my garden than the food was actually worth in dollars. But it is worth it to get better tomatoes and fresh okra that is not overly mature or bruised.
Anti-capitalist rant ahead
Normally I’d be all for this. I am. I have a few tiny vegie containers of my own and given the capacity would have loved to have been able to grow enough to share with people around me. I posted for awareness of seed libraries if people didn’t already know.
I post to Frugal, try to post things to do that are some action rather than nothing, and share budget recipes that are basically poverty food. (I will continue doing this.) During lockdown I was posting local foraging maps of fruit trees to Reddit. If I wasn’t so physically disabled and mentally unwell I would have considered volunteering with Food Not Bombs.
However I can’t help but feel cynical about how these ‘motivational’ advice articles and suggestions are yet another way the burden of poverty and managing food insecurity are put back on the people experiencing it. The whole pushing of individual effort to manage systemic inequality.
And people on the lower rungs that can afford or have the energy to take on extra stuff after work have likely already have been doing this. I knew people in public housing who did this ten years ago not as a fashionable thing but to feed their families.
This is not a knock at OP and this article is a lot more sensible and realistic than others I have seen over the years. Maybe this helps someone who is newer to poverty and food insecurity. I will certainly keep contributing any suggestions and resources I think could help anyone get by.
It’s just… Things shouldn’t have been allowed to get to this point and there’s only so much further people can stretch to make ends meet. Especially people who are disabled, already have manual jobs or juggle gig work. This growing level of wealth inequality is fucked, it was predicted ten years ago even without the pando justifying inflation, and it’s so depressing to see all these well meaning top-down advice articles.
Wealth is concentrating to corporations and the people at the top to the point ordinary people are struggling to eat and food banks are overwhelmed, and instead of any action the media are cheerily offering people a bandaid. That they have to apply themselves. When they get a spare hand and a minute.
I can’t begin to tell you the mental load of all the ‘easy little things’ you have to juggle being poor and I am so much luckier than some.
People shouldn’t have to come home after work and labour more just to get fed because essentials like food and housing have been made increasingly inaccessible and their wages aren’t enough.
Also they are seriously underestimating yield. I don’t expect a lot but with my little containers I can expect a literal handful of produce for the expenditure and work and see it more as a relatively cheap hobby. I could expand vertically but that has challenges as a renter.
Ps. On a more practical and less ragey note.
If you do do the guerilla gardening thing for edible food or start a vegie patch please test your soil for heavy metals and other contaminants. I won’t be bothering as containers are what is feasible for me but if you’re interested try these guys https://www.360dustanalysis.com/ or you can look at a soil map for your area (less reliable)
Please be aware contamination concerns (and council bylaws, and anti-fox measures that add up) also apply if you plan to keep chickens. Which I would love to but yeah. I don’t have the space, the living situation stability, and staying on top of it is more than I can handle.
Also for foraging, I’m not experienced but be wary of things growing by paths ie dandelions or blackberries - you don’t want a mouthful of dog wee or sprayed weedkiller. Do not try to identify wild mushrooms by yourself.
And be very careful of buying foraging guides online as there have been cases of AI written foraging guides with inaccurate and dangerous advice, ie tasting something to identify it. See my above point about mushrooms. Make sure the author is reputable.
Pps. Seriously do not do edible guerilla gardening on a golf course. One you’d probably get charged and two the soil is heavily contaminated from ages of being soaked in arsenic based pesticides. Or something. Idk. Nothing you want to be eating.
Remember that any netting used should be a particular type to avoid entangling and killing birds or animals. “Hungry animals are easily caught in ‘bird netting’, which has a mesh size greater than 1cm square. Wildlife friendly netting should have a mesh size of less than 5 mm.”
I’m not kidding, an anti-cruelty regulation came in 2019. If you have the old netting you need to replace it.
And be careful of roaming neighbour cats. They love to use the soft soil of vegie gardens as an open air litterbox, potentially opening you up to parasites or bacteria if you don’t prevent that.
Even if this caught on, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with another Wickard v. Filburn. Because if we don’t punish you for growing “too much” wheat, on your own land, for your own personal use, then how are we supposed to force you to buy it from us?
Obligatory Steinbeck quote
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
There is plenty of food, unfortunately there is also plenty of cunts
Alternatively, we could eat the CxOs of colesworths.
As an avid gardener near Bathurst of many years experience I’ve realised there are a short list of veges which are economical to grow, depending on various factors. All the rest are vanities except for their value as a luxury.
To start with, potatoes, garlic, pumpkin and silver beet are fundamental. You could live off them, and after a few years they become weeds so you never need to sow again. They don’t need much fertiliser or special soil. I grow everything in raised beds with that layer of woodchip mulch and they just come up every year. No pests to speak of.
Second tier would be cos lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, rocket and carrots. These about break even if you don’t include time spent cultivating them. I save seeds mainly so I can sow carrots and lettuce densely and prevent weeds. They need more fertiliser but it’s worth it and the picking season is long enough for most. Cos lettuce because you can cut and come again.
Everything else is basically a waste of time. Heirloom tomatoes, beetroot, turnip, various brassicas, just not worth it. It’s much easier to buy fresh and save money. I do grow broccoli but I use the greens and any heads are a bonus.
I grow beetroot in preference to silverbeet, and use the leaves of those as well as the roots. In the right conditions tomatoes are also very prolific and produce a very worthwhile crop - as long as you are not spending a fortune on advanced seedlings and tomato cages I’m not sure how you could find them not worth it.
It depends a lot on your specific growing conditions and what you tend to eat - in the right conditions some plants grow like weeds and are very worthwhile, whereas in someone else’s garden the same plant may be nearly impossible to grow. The most important thing is to work out what grows well for you, in your garden.
In my experience root crops take more effort and are hard to get to a size equivalent to store bought. It’s probably my techniques but I am a lazy gardener. While silver beet grows better for me than commercial crop.
With tomatoes I find bigger varieties are tasty targets for birds and other pests while smaller ones escape their notice and also crop over a longer period. Plus they self seed better and seem more resistant to pests. Speaking of which I once bought tomato seedlings from Bunnings but they had purple leaf curl virus which recurred the next year so I had to go without for some years to fix that. Never again.
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Fruit trees are easy and cost effective. They do take time to come to fruit and you need a yard . Apple, lemon, mandarin, apricots, whit peach. avocados, maybe a nut tree like walnut, grapes… Herbs are also cost effective.
I hear the wild grass and mushrooms are nice
(Sarcasm)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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But done cleverly and cheaply, you can cut your food bills with fresh greens, vegetables, herbs and even by foraging.
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Good quality growing compost will improve harvest yields and save you money longer term.
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Old food-safe containers, plastic pots or even repurposed household items can be an easy way to start growing.
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While more expensive up front, hydroponics offer a more controlled growing environment to ensure higher yields and protect your plants against extreme or unpredictable weather as the climate changes.
If you plant onions, cabbage and broccoli, you’ll find they take up space in the garden, grow reasonably slowly and only yield a harvest once.
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After all, times are tough and one of the best things we can do is stay connected to our local communities and feel comforted by knowing we’re not alone — help is at hand.
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The original article contains 980 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 84%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Bro. Telling me how many sentences skipped is annoying. Telling me how many sentences skipped in bold is ridiculous. You are taking up more space and demanding attention with bold than your ‘summaries’
The summary on my tablet is 15 lines. Your intro, outro and telling me how much you skipped is 22 lines. So, this summary can be shortened by 59%.
Signal to noise is atrocious.
Gonna have to block you😞