Growing your own food...??

By Eliza Daley, originally published by By my solitary hearth

Don't you hate when reality ruins a really good idea... Yeah, I know that's not a problem for many people. Economics -- even "ecological economics" -- wouldn't be a thing if it was regularly reality tested, being based on scarcity over abundance and competition over cooperation... neither of which are true. But anyway...

"Grow your own food" sounds like a great idea. What's that harm in that! Gardening is a physical and emotional joy... And right away I have run out of unconditionally positive things that aren't tempered by reality...

Of course, many people garden just for the joy. Their gardens tend to be heavy on pretty and light on utility. Some might weave notions of feeding wildlife into the selection of plants they grow. All these are good things... until you rack up the plastic pots and bags of mulch or compost and shipping fuel and packaging. Even when you buy from a local garden center, most of the plants will be grown elsewhere, and most of these travel great distances. Especially in regions with difficult climate or places with limited growing space. And there are zero plants sold in a garden center that are not potted in plastic.

I managed a garden center. The plastic waste was appalling. I tried to send it off for recycling, but nobody would take it. I was told that the plastic is typically too poor in quality, often an awkward shape for recycling centers, and dirty -- which you'd think is not a problem for something that is going to be melted... But it is. Dirty things often end up in landfills just because the machines can't cope with the contamination. (This is true for all recycling, by the way... so clean out those cans and jars.) In any case, I was told repeatedly that none of it gets recycled. Which I took to mean that there are too few recycling centers buying the stuff to make it profitable to collect it from consumers. But it might be true that, in actuality, none of it is getting recycled...

So there's that...

I try to get around that by growing my own plants and reusing what plastic I do use. But I don't really have the lifetime left to grow a fruiting tree from a seed. Even a shrub is pushing it. In the veg garden, when the numerous things that go wrong with seeds do go wrong, there's usually not enough growing season to start over. Also, I don't have a large space, so it doesn't take too much to wipe out the entirety of what I have planted. When things like that happen, I often break down and buy plants just so that I have some harvest, so that the hard work I've put in isn't wasted, so that there is actually something preserved for the dormant season. So even though I save seeds and grow my own starts, I buy a number of plants every year. I try to ignore that... I rationalize by telling myself that, next year, things won't go quite so wrong and I won't need to buy. And then I conveniently forget how much I've bought... until I read my garden journal.

Which is what I have been doing rather a lot since my spinal cord went up in flames...

I am guilty of the Alice syndrome: I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it... I keep meticulous notes on what I've bought, where and when I've planted it, and any adverse conditions that might get in the way of productivity. I jot down what is working, what is not working, what I'd like to try. I make note of the weather when that gets difficult, which, for a variety of reasons, is pretty much all the time these days. I rant on and on and on about the rodents and what "needs to be done" to "solve" that problem. (Short of flame throwers...) So I have a good record. There really is no excuse for repeating mistakes... but I do.

But there are things I could not eliminate even if I followed all my excellent advice. I can not avoid the shipping of compost and mulch. All the compost I generate can't fill my veg beds each year. Because I am just one person. I don't produce that much compostable waste. Similarly, my small property, even with a jungle of deciduous trees, doesn't generate sufficient mulch to cover the soil when there aren't veg plants growing, never mind enough to keep the potatoes and strawberries happy. I buy bulk mulch and compost as much as possible, and I buy from a local supplier. But there is still a diesel engine involved. And any shortfalls that need to be addressed quickly, but in small amounts, always come in bags. So, for example, when the chipmunks excavate under the pea cage and cause the entire thing to collapse, I have to fill in the holes with bagged soil. When midsummer downpours wash away all the wood chips under the perennials on the front bank, I have to buy bagged mulch -- and often a bit of bagged garden soil to fill in the small gullies before they become large gullies...

I've tried to make my peace with this, arguing that on balance the gardening I do is better for me and for my part of the planet than if I were to stop. And really, I can't stop. There is dirt around this house. If I stopped cultivating plants in it, then there would be weeds. Mostly grass. And I hate grass... I would have to do things to maintain the weeds at a tolerable level. Maybe that doesn't involve shipping compost and buying plants, but it does mean work and expense. And it's completely futile work and expense. Never done, never producing anything, never making anyone happy. Not even the weeds. Because I'd never allow them to grow into rank maturity and spread their seeds all over everything. (Pretty sure my town would have things to say about that even if I could tolerate such a landscape... which I can't... so, moot point...)

But this year I've been unable to put in the work, and that has led to thinking quite a bit about this work that I'm not getting done. Also, for a number of reasons, I am feeling somewhat short on funds and have been adding up what I spend to try to redirect the cash flow to house and car repairs, medical bills, and other "unexpected" expenses, alongside the exponentially increasing costs of everything. And this is the reality check that is causing me anxiety this week...

The idea behind veg gardening is that you are producing at least some of the food you eat. You do this because you can grow what you like in a manner that isn't toxic to you and the planet. But many of us would like to think that we are saving money by putting in this work. A packet of seeds costs less than just one bunch of carrots these days, after all. Stands to reason that you can get more out of money invested in seeds than what you get from the same dollars spent at the grocery store. Except that's not true exactly... First of all, the carrots you grow don't just cost the money you spend on seeds. There is the soil and whatever you use to keep it nutritionally balanced and nominally free of pests. There is water. Some folks would add in the labor time, though I count the garden work as exercise, good in itself regardless of productive output beyond my body.

But the bigger problem with the accounting is that you don't need all the carrots in that packet of seeds all at once. You need half a dozen or so a week, if you eat a lot of carrots. And this should be spread out all through the year, not just the summer months. Eating directly out of the garden doesn't feed you in the winter. A harvest should store through the winter, or there is no point to a harvest. You can get nutritional sufficiency in the growing season just by foraging. We cultivate food not to eat when food is abundant, but when it is not.

So that is why we plant a packet of carrot seeds. But as soon as you plant a packet of seeds, you have to figure out how you're going to store the dozens of carrots that you won't be eating right away. You could spread out the harvest with successive sowing, but even that is sometimes going to produce more than you need. And abundance turns to rot when you can't address it in time. Every garden has weeks of feral abundance when you can't possibly eat what is ripe, even if you wanted to... and nothing tastes good when that's all you get for days and days and days... But even if you knuckle down and eat peas for every meal, you're still going to fall short of eating all the peas. You're going to need to store some, probably most (Or there's always the compost pile...)

In any case, to use the carrots that you get out of packet of carrot seeds requires a good system of storing the carrots. I have a chest freezer and bins in the basement, but these aren't ideal. Freezing veg produces... frozen veg... which is not exceptionally palatable even when done well. It also loses nutrition. However, veg put in the freezer will generally last -- unless the power goes out for more than a few hours... The bins of roots are a bit more dicey. I can't store anything in the basement until late in the fall because it's not cool enough down there. But then, come January, I have to watch that it's not desiccating -- or sometimes even freezing. Though, truthfully, I don't have much left in the bins by the middle of January. Potatoes, maybe onions, maybe a few rutabagas. I have eaten much of it, but a rather alarming amount of it will end up in the compost bins because it's gone bad. So my storage system is not good... It is certainly not getting all the carrots out of that packet of seed. (Though I suppose I am feeding the soil...)

I could invest in a pressure canner. Or, if I could tolerate the salt and acid, I could pickle more than I do. But both of those storage methods would add to the heat in my house, which is the opposite of helpful in summer. And both reduce the nutritional value of what is stored. Still, I could do that... if I had a place to store the jars. Since the 2023 flood, I haven't had such a thing. Nor do I have many jars left. So that's going to take quite a bit of expense to remediate... for food that isn't that great for me.

But whatever I grow out there, whatever my storage methods, I will never be able to eat out of the garden through the winter. Truthfully, I don't even save much on the grocery bill in the summer. Because, it must be noted, the vegetable garden only produces vegetables. While veg is nutritionally essential, with exception made for some roots and squash, it is not particularly high in calories. It doesn't feed you, fuel your cells, give you energy. We grow fruits and grains for calories, and most veg gardens do not produce much in the way of fruit or grain. Maybe a row of sweet corn or an experiment in amaranth and quinoa, maybe strawberry plants or raspberry bushes or an apple tree... but the entire average veg garden harvest hardly meets a month's caloric needs for one person.

Unfortunately, all of the calorically dense foods come from plants that produce but one harvest a year. This means there is a bounty that must be preserved. With fruits, you can use many of the same methods as you use with veg. My freezer is usually half full of fruit, and several of the bins get filled up with apples. But grain production is a bit beyond the capacity of most households. Growing grain takes a great deal of land. There is much waste to be dealt with after you've threshed and winnowed out the grain. A grinder is essential. And you must have a large dry, dark space to store the grain.

The veg garden, in actuality, doesn't feed me. Even an ideal veg garden would not do much to reduce the annual grocery bills, because most of the groceries are not veg. But no veg garden is ever going to produce at ideal capacity. (Ideals don't exist, after all...) And my garden is far from any ideal. So I spend money on veg at the co-op and the farmers' markets even in the summer because the veg that I am trying to grow is not growing out there. And then follow months when nothing is growing at all and I'm relying on both my imperfect harvest and my even less perfect storage system. Or rather, not relying... buying from the store...

I'm willing to bet that most veg gardeners are just like me. Maybe all of you. And maybe some of you are thinking right now, But that's not why I garden...

I used to think that also.

I used to think that I gardened to grow good food for myself, to take some of the burden of my body's needs off of the wider world, and, most of all, to enjoy being out in the garden.

But lately I've begun to feel that none of those reasons are reality based.

Let's start with growing good food. I think much of what I've written above shows that I am not doing that. Most years, the best I am getting is less toxic salad greens and tomatoes in summer and some apples and roots for winter storage. There are flushes of other things, like this year's extravagant pea harvest. But I can't count on that, nor even count that as much of a food need. I'm not even completely convinced that eating peas that were stored in a plastic bag in the freezer is much better for my body than not eating peas. And while I have bags of peas, so far there is no zucchini this year nor have I gotten more than a few handfuls of beans -- because it's been so dry since midsummer. But even if there were beans and zucchini, I would still be buying much of my food needs elsewhere. I am growing grace notes on my diet. I am not growing food.

So what of that? Whatever I am producing for myself is that much less burden on the world, right?

I don't know... If I go by the money I've spent this year, I think maybe not. Because every dollar I spend on gardening correlates to some harmful waste elsewhere, whether it be plastic pots or transport fuel or copious water use. Buying a bag of compost, even from Vermont Compost, generates a good deal of harm, from the bag to the transport trucks to the run-off from intensive composting facilities. What did those peas cost the world?

And then joy...

Suffice it to say that I am not especially happy with my desiccated weed pit. And after spending weeks with the remnants of meningitis from one bug bite, I'm beginning to question my ideas of joy...

Still, the industrial food system is worse. By many orders of magnitude. By any measure.

So... what am I learning from all this?

Mostly that I can't do for myself. That there is no such thing. Which... I already knew...

How does that translate into food?

I think individual gardening is not the answer. I think communal farming is. A garden has too many needs that must be brought in from outside, many of those from a farm. A community farm better meets the needs of plants, and so it better meets the needs of the community. But mostly, a garden does not produce what humans need to eat. A diverse and extensive farm does.

I also think that food storage needs to be part of the food production system. And obviously I don't believe that chemical preservatives or intense processing are the best methods of storing food. If we can't build houses with food storage capacity -- and I don't think we can, at this point -- then we should be building community pantries. Root cellars and cold storage, preferably done with a minimum of refrigeration. There ought to be grain storage, which is probably the only good use of plastic, dozens of storage drums filled with dried wheat and corn and rice. And near that storage warehouse -- which should be very near the actual grain fields -- there might also be spaces for processing and grinding grain. Again as a communal enterprise, not for profit, but for food production.

For now, since those things do not exist, I think I would do better for myself and for the planet if I bought my food from local farmers, those that I know are using the least harmful methods of growing food. At worst, the pumpkin that I buy from an organic farm has not spent time in a plastic pot and is not shipped anywhere -- until it gets into my electric car.

I also think I need to invest what I am no longer spending on plants and mulch on winter storage. That way, I could buy turnips, beets and potatoes in bulk and pick crates of apples and winter squash at the orchard. I could buy a 50-pound sack of rolled oats from Heritage Grains. If I get the grinder I've wanted for years, I could buy Champlain Valley wheat whole grain. With those staples and the local milk and eggs I already buy from the co-op, I would be fairly well fed all year long.

Then I could really focus on the grace notes in the garden. Rather than trying to produce a nutritionally diverse harvest, I could grow what I want in my life that I can't get from farmers around here. Or that I think I could do better. I am a better herb gardener than anyone up here mainly because I've been at it for longer than most, but also because I learned from people who grew herbs to use them not just for garden decor (or worse... magick...). I also grow really good sauce tomatoes... and everyone else is growing "heirlooms"... which are nice to eat in summer, but sort of superfluous. And chiles... I am a chile farmer. I've been growing Big Jims and Sandia Hots for decades. And I eat them. A lot of them. In my present garden I have not yet produced enough to meet my voracious chile needs. And it probably doesn't need to be said, but Vermont does not grow chile... So, I've been shipping in chiles, both canned and fresh, which causes me no end of guilt... But just one bed out there entirely devoted to New Mexico green chile would be at least equal to the twenty-five pounds I buy from Hatch.

I could still grow some beans and peas in with the tomatoes and herbs (not the chiles... they need sun!). I could have fun with mini-pumpkins and small gourds. Maybe even work in onions and garlic, since those don't take up much space and tend to make the rest of the garden happy. But none of this potato nonsense. No cabbage, no radishes, kale only in the fall. Probably no carrots, since I am rather terrible about thinning them out and keeping them watered, and they do take up quite a lot of space above ground for one root. And no turnips...

I would add more flowers though... because a packet of flower seed is 100% a good investment. And full of joy!

I've also been doing this sort of accounting exercise in the rest of my life... because lots of things are affected by meningitis... and too often at the end of the work day, I can do little but sit and think... not too hard... sometimes even that is too much and I do sudoku puzzles until I fall asleep.

But the question of what brings me joy is foremost right now. Came a bit too close to not being... Makes one reassess time... I need to take my own advice and focus on this one life that I get.

I have arrived at the conclusion that much about my life is not bringing me joy. Most things are obligations. Many are just useless. Consequently, I have been pulling inward. Which is my impulse at this time of year anyway, but this year it is stronger. I suspect that I will not pick up those obligations again with the expansive spring.

I began writing an essay on hierarchy and duality the other day and found I just don't care enough to finish it. This might be all I have to say on that subject. In any case, whatever I say is only reaching two audiences -- those who broadly agree and those who vehemently hate every word I write. Those words aren't having much of an effect in either case. So, I ask myself, why bother... Especially on topics that really inflame the haters...

I think I shall stick to home and hearth... that's where I belong... that's where I believe we all belong... and it brings me much joy to be here.

Today, I hung laundry on the line, baked two loaves of banana bread, cleaned the bathrooms, and listened to Jann Tiersen all day long. That is more than enough...