Intro to Gardening: Planning your space!
You can do a lot with a little, all you need is some planning, and effort.
The Discourse™ over the last month which has surprisingly been even more difficult to bear than usual, centered around what is easily one of the least arguable aspects of building revolutionary power: Food Security.
There seems to be some kind of grand misconception on a portion of the left that grocery stores, farms, and other massive scale producers of food will remain in operation during and after a revolution, or worse, during/after a general strike. It’s a common pitfall for white academic leftists to not fully consider all of the things taken for granted, such as “where our food comes from” or “how do people in poorer places around the globe feed themselves?” The often assumption being “they don’t”. They just live in perpetual suffering and hunger. While that is true is some places, in most of the world, it’s simply not the case. Their meager salaries primarily are there for rent and supplemental foods which are difficult to grow. The staples, Rice, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, greens, are grown locally if not right out back. They take up very little space and require only a fair amount of upfront labor to get going. So let’s take a page from their books and start talking about how you can grow some food for yourself.
For this article, we’ll discuss 3 different scenarios of living conditions and how you would grow food in each one. Those will be 1) A single family home in a city (i.e., plenty of outside space); 2) An apartment with a balcony (i.e., limited outside space); 3) an apartment without a balcony or yard (i.e., no outside space to yourself). So let’s dig in:
Scenario 1: Single Family homes
This scenario will include everything from town homes, suburbs, even to duplex style section 8 housing developments which are surrounded by grass. Here’s a couple of Google Map screen grabs to get an idea of what I’m talking about:
In each of these cases you can see there is at least a small yard around each house that is currently being wasted growing grass. The idea that you need a ton of space to grow plenty of food is a lie perpetuated to keep you in line at the store.
Let me show you what I mean:
Your average backyard in a Single Family Home (SFH from here out) is gonna have around 4-800 sq feet of space. Meaning your fences will on average be at least 20 feet long in either direction. By using only a fraction of that space, you can build around 9 beds, which means you can grow around 18 different veggies and have room for a compost system. Here’s what my garden layout in Alabama was:
In the Herb beds, I had one that was completely overrun with Basil, the other was Dill, Thyme, Lavender, and Oregano. In the Greens bed was Mustard Greens, and Bib Butterhead Lettuce. The peppers were Bell pepper and chile peppers (which didn’t take), I grew a section of the Goliath sunflowers simply for the seeds (the face of a Goliath breed is about the size of a standard dinner plate and has around 500 seeds).
The compost system was two “bins” made from standing up pallets. The process was to drop new and fresh compostables into one bin, and every week turn it over into the second bin where it would finish breaking down before going into the garden. I also happened to have a small Vermi-compost bin for things like Egg shells, Coffee Grounds, and some greens, to create a super powered fertilizer for the garden.
The end result was MASSIVE hauls on each of the different foods. The mustard greens were 16-20” tall and a single leaf was more than enough for mixing in with the others for a good salad. The cucumbers we 14” long and about 3.5” around. Which meant we were eating a ton of cucumbers, pickles, etc for snacks all fall and winter.
This particular system does take a decent amount of effort upfront to build. I got all the materials from local construction companies who were throwing away wood and pallets, and I ordered the seeds off MiGardener’s website (I really recommend his seeds). So if you got a weekend or two to spare, you can easily do the same thing and after the initial investment, you’re needing about 10 minutes a day for watering to cover it. There’s no weeding required in the beds as you are growing so much food, there is no room for the weeds. Insects aren’t a problem and if you do run into some, Food Grade diatomaceous earth is an excellent and safe way to deal with ants, grubs, etc.
Scenario 2: Apartments with Balcony’s or Townhomes with micro yards
If you can’t build long ways, your other option is build up! In the case of the townhomes building vertical pallet gardens is an excellent option. You can see a quick DiY project on them here! They look something like this:
This is an excellent option for greens, herbs, or vine based foods like Squash, Cucumber, Tomato, etc.
The alternative for both those with balconies or micro yards is 5 Gal containers!
From there you can plant any number of things, potatoes being especially easy to grow. A setup like this require only about 4-5’ in length and about 3’ in width. So most balconies can easily support a system like it. and if you plant smart and stick to greens and vine foods, you can have more than enough food to live on in a pinch.
Scenario 3: Apartments with no outdoor space
While this is by far the most difficult system to overcome, places like this tend to have a lot of community space instead of individual spaces. So the path forward here, is two fold: First, you need to organize the people in your building/complex to be on board with using up some of the community space for community gardening. Second, you can then collectively build out something akin to which scenario best fits your communities land availability.
The other option of course if to go the traditional community garden route in which you either purchase or get gifted some plot of land (cities will sometimes do this for charity orgs, so you can look into going that route) which you can then treat as a scenario one, but instead of using a portion of the property, you can utilize all of it.
As we get closer and closer to the awakening of the middle and lower classes and begin the long push for things like General Strikes and revolution, it’s going to become more apparent and more important that food security is a priority. Let’s start early and work out all the kinks now, instead of having to do it in a survival situation.
-EQ