Revive the Victory Garden! For Victory over Global Warming

I was wondering if anyone had thought of this and Lo! I Googled and I did find. I hope this catches on because it helps fight climate change by reducing use of oil (from transporting food to chemical fertilizers and pesticides all from oil) and by increasing vegetation other than mere grass. This has me fired up to attempt to grow something beyond tomatoes this year. Anyone have a cure for a black thumb? I tend to kill anything that does not come to me as a hearty seedling.

http://www.urbansustainableliving.net/VictoryGarden/index.html

What is a Victory Garden?

During World War I and World War II, the United States government asked its citizens to plant gardens in order to support the war effort. Millions of people planted gardens. Emphasis was placed on making gardening a family or community effort - not a drudgery, but a pastime, and a national duty.

Why plant a victory garden?

Today our food travels an average of 1500 miles from farm to table. The process of planting, fertilizing, processing, packaging, and transporting our food uses a great deal of energy and contributes to the cause of global warming.

Planting a Victory Garden to fight global warming would reduce the amount of pollution your food contibutes to global warming. Instead of traveling many miles from farm to table, your food would travel from your own garden to your table.
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A similar project, scroll to the bottom to see other groups:

Cascadia Food Not Lawns
http://www.foodnotlawns.com/index.html


Victory Garden Redux
http://plant.chardum.com/uncategorized/2007/02/02/victory-garden-redux/


two articles on how Cuba has gone organic and resorted to community gardens to sustain it's population after the loss of USSR subsidies in the early 90s:

Organic fruit and vegetable growing as a national policy: the Cuban story
http://www.energybulletin.net/13067.html

Cuba Turns to Mother Earth
With fertilizers and fuel scarce, organic farming is in
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/02/21/MN102237.DTL

Also be conscious of the water you drink - rethink bottled water - As over 150 million gallons of oil are used a year transporting "bottled water" for the "health conscious."

the US, where we have extremely safe and potable water coming out of our taps most places.

Paranoia born of ignorance, IMHO.

I use a Britta filter for my water, but only for improved taste and because I like it cold from the fridge - not because I'm afraid to drink tap water.

My sister and I moved into a townhouse with a small side yard...and set up 4 12'x4' raised beds. Our first year was an experiment...we got lots of peppers and basil, a few beans (thanks to potatoe beetles and Japanese beetles), better production of tomatoes and squash, a few cukes...you get my drift. We are armed and ready for this year and hope to put lots of food away for next winter, and of course to eat fresh all summer. We filled the raised beds with mushroom compost and coffee grounds from work (hospital so 24/7 coffee pots working) and kitchen scraps. No petroleum fertilizers. Sucked up fall leaves with our leaf vac for mulch. You can usually get free straw/hay bales after folks are through with their fall seasonal displays for more mulch. Gardenweb.com is a good site for suggestions to maximize production.

are in most grocery stores.


You supply your own jugs - and peddle up there on your bike - fill 'em up and, frank-viola!, you have really clean unchloronated drinking and cooking water - for pennies!:toast:

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Not a real serious thing (if true). But keep taking your multi vitamin/mineral dose each day.

(Didn't know about the heart med thing!)

I also have "problems" with groundhogs, squirrels and rabbits.

I also have a black walnut on my property, a huge one. This tree is an Allelopath and secretes a powerful herbicide, juglone, that kills vegetables.

This herbicide is pretty persistent. It has killed several promising gardens that I have had. I had no idea what the problem with my gardens was until I researched the matter.

But for everyone else, your idea is an excellent one however.

Do you know if butternuts have the same effect?

I'd estimate it extends through the trees root system, 5-10 meters from the base of the tree. Regrettably this is the area I have fenced off and which is protected from deer and various other animals.

In my front yard I have a very, very, very rare tree, an American Chestnut. This tree is also an alellopath according to the literature, but the tree, which has survived an attack of blight, seems not to have as much effect as the black walnut.

There's a whole grove of them in WI (planted far away from the natural range) that still survives-- thouh the blight finally found its way there, too.

If you can't do your own garden for whatever reason, please support CSAs -- Community Supported Agriculture, which are going to be local farms and usually they band togehter and create co-ops. You can usually "subscribe" for a season, and get a weekly bag or two of farm fresh produce. ALMOST ALWAYS organic or nearly so -- you can't legally call anything "organic" anymore until you've jumped thru the hoops for the USDA so you can get the official designation, but you can grow it organically without that -- but have to call it " natural" or something. I heartily recommend participating. We love ours.

There is indeed a local CSA for me: http://www.nofanj.org/

One of the more important things we can do for our environment is to eat locally grown produce when it's available.

Thanks again.

You made MY day. To your health -- and that of the planet. :party:

http://www.communitygarden.org/index.php

Find out if there is one near you try here:
http://www.communitygarden.org/faq.php#find

You can make garden boxes filled with their own soil mix.

I thwart the hordes of deer with a 7-foot-high fence of bird netting supported by green metal fence stakes, the kind with hooks and little holes. It was incredibly hard installing the poles in our rocky, hard red clay, but it keeps the deer out.

Three 4' x 8' plus one 4' x 12' raised beds, yield enough for just us two. I would like to tear out a section of the front lawn and add another few, and then learn how to preserve what we are unable to eat during the season. Drip irrigation is the way to go for watering, especially in drought-stricken regions such as ours.

I expect food prices to increase sharply this Summer and Fall with a further decline in the dollar and oil prices moving back over $60/barrel.

Keep buckets in bathrooms & kitchen to catch water while waiting for it to get warm. Rinse dishes in a pan to recycle...not too much soap for reuse, especially on flowers. Water from cooking pasta, vegetables, etc. can be added to compost or used for watering. (Grey water must be used in a day or two.) Also, of course, containers to catch rain water.

It won't be enough water to support a farm, but it will pretty much take care of a small family sized garden.

Mulch heavily to reduce watering needs.

The South Central Farm project is located on 14 acres of land in the middle of South Central Los Angeles.
It has been used as a collective community farm since 1992 and is one of the largest urban gardens in the United States.
It feeds 350 families by providing fresh fruits and vegetables on a daily basis.
On june 13 2006 the farmers were forcibly evicted, about 50 people were arrested. As you are reading this the whole farm is being bulldozed.

http://www.southcentralfarmers.com

--

"There are three vacant warehouses acrosss the street..."

Largest Urban Farm in the Country on the Verge of Eviction
A Report by Chris Hume, Truthout
http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm
The South Central Farm is like an oasis. Situated in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, it is a haven for the poor working people of the area, where they can grow and sell their own food locally. But they face eviction. Truthout correspondent Chris Hume interviews Daryl Hannah, Julia Butterfly Hill, and the local farmers about their struggle to stay on the land they've been farming for 14 years.

It sat on my 35 degree porch for a few months, then I left it on the kitchen counter for about a month until I got around to cooking it. It was delicious. Next year, I will grow many more.

Doomsday Squash.

A few years ago, I ran a test to see how long one would last. I took a dozen or so an we ate one every few months. The last one was eaten 18 months later and it was still edible.

Try the young ones, about 4-5 inches long as summer squash. They fry up well.

and they grow almost anywhere. One local farm stand owner joked that they would grow on asphalt if the cars wouldn't un over them.

when the immature squash remaining will be ruined anyway. I found that the mature ones taste best if they are allowed a full season(here in Maine) of growth.

Last summer, our garden had a boffo July and the plants grew and fruited pretty quickly. The winter squash vines were all dried out in August, so I just picked the plants and put them away. Had some problem with rot.

I tried planting "late crops". I planted some cauliflower in late July in a space where the early lettuce had already finished. They grew slowly in the shortening days. Bugs chewed one of them to bits. The cauliflower that survived was only as big as a tennis ball. So, I think that our garden is "not so good" for late crops. There is this spruce tree that starts to shade it in the time of long shadows.

is a plague on squash and related crops. I save my own seed and have found that the infected squash spoil early. I found that saving seed from those that survive the Winter ensures a low probability of the infection being transmitted through the seeds. This technique works well with other veggies too.
Commercial seed producers spray their seed crops with chemicals to prevent seed borne infections but organic seed producers don't. many so-called organically certified seeds that I have purchased in the past were infected and contaminated other seedlings in the same flat.
I destroy any contaminated seedlings lest they pass the infection to my garden where it may be impossible to get rid of without the use of chemicals.
Try growing flowers in with your vegetables that attract predatory insects which rely on flower nectar to survive until their prey species appear. I have not had to use any pesticides in seven years.

(Coincidentally, the squash we grew were from "volunteers" from plants that grew in 2005.) I would guess that a third of them rotted in the garden. We still had a lot.

Thanks for the information about fungicide-treated seeds. I have not read up on that subject yet. I find it hard to believe that a few dozen fungicide-treated seeds in my garden is going to create a "health problem". As for flowers, we planted geraniums in the vegetable beds that got to be over three foot wide during our great growing season last year. We also noticed that "nothing messes with the onions". I am still developing my knowledge of companion planting, which is where this is all leading.

It's seeds that are internally contaminated with fungus. When the plant begins to grow it's already infected from within.
I usually select a half dozen or so of the nicest squash and keep them for last. If they remain in good condition by Spring, I will save the seeds from the best tasting ones, this way my selections hopefully improve year by year. This is how it was done in the 'old days', before genetic engineering.

Knowledge. Buy garden books and read them. Make sure they are for your area. Join a Master Gardener's Program or your local gardening club. Ask for tips from your neighbor with the green thumb. Most good gardeners love to share their techniques.

The other reason for growing your own food: You'll never find anything that tastes as good in the grocery store. :)

or whatever they're called in your state. Very good program.

And books are great and important. BUT you must get out there and DO it.

And please, please, please garden organically. Please. There's no GOOD excuse not to. A bad bug here and there is both normal and healthy. It

Good old manure or compost.

Have you ever read any of wendell Berry
he is a farmer /writer

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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”




WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY -- I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.


We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all -- by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians -- be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.


How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.


Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes -- the farms and ranches and working forests -- and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.


Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work.


It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.

--Wendell Berry

To put the bounty and the health of our land,
our only commonwealth, into the hands of people
who do not live on it and share its fate
will always be an error.
For whatever determines the fortune of the land
determines also the fortune of the people.
If history teaches anything, it teaches that.
--Wendell Berry

It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that
governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best
citizen is the one who least needs governing. The answer to big
government is not private freedom, but private responsibility.
-Wendell Berry, "The Loss of the Future" in The Long-Legged House
(1969),



To forget how to dig the earth and to
tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

--Mahatma Gandhi

http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/bank/idea.php?ideaId=1

After thirty years of study, research and practical experience in Agroforestry (see previous item), Robert Hart established a small model forest garden on his farm on Wenlock Edge, a model that could be repeated many thousands of times even by those who possess only small town gardens.
'The Forest Garden can enable a family to enjoy a considerable degree of self-sufficiency, with minimal labour'

The Forest Garden can enable a family to enjoy a considerable degree of self-sufficiency, with minimal labour, for some seven months of the year, providing the very best foods for building up positive health. It is a miniature reproduction of the self-maintaining eco-system of the natural forest, consisting entirely of fruit and nut trees and bushes, perennial and self-seeding vegetables and culinary and medicinal herbs.

Robert Hart wrote: 'It is no good waiting for the Powers-That-Be to take decisive action in the infinitely serious crisis caused by wholesale forest destruction, curbed and restricted as they are by blind prejudice and vested interests. Those who care, the ordinary people, should take action themselves to restore the earth's depleted forest cover, even though they may live in cities.'


snip

The 'canopy' formed by the tops of the higher trees;
- The planes of low-growing trees such as dwarf fruits;
- The 'shrub layer' comprising bush fruits;
- The herbaceous layer of herbs and vegetables;
- The ground layer of plants which spread horizontally rather than vertically, such as creeping thyme;
- The vertical layer occupied by climbing berries and vines;
- The 'rhizosphere', shade-tolerant root-plants.

Get a copy of Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening

Read up on Terra Preta - use of charcoal as a long-term soil conditioner and CO2 sink.

Use your own yard trimmings and leaves to make mulch and compost. IMPORT nutrients - don't export them to landfills.

I started doing it last summer and had 7-foot-high tomato plants. We grew eggplant successfully for the first time, and had a bumper crop of peppers and much more.

http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

I first heard of Permaculture from a friend in Australia. The movement is spreading throughout the world.

Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

I will have to see if my library has any books on this. Here's hoping there is such a thing as Permaculture for Dummies or a Complete Idiot's Guide.....