At the tract homes I found the usual accoutraments... imported cars, useless landscaping, slate walkways...
In the "old timey" homes , I found gardens, chickens, goats...
Here's a shot of a hillside garden.
This garden was across the street and down the road a little bit from the one above.
The owners of this last garden have vast gardens beyond this photo and hold classes locally to help people preserve their garden produce.The world is not going to come to an end if every other home has a garden like these.
I just posted this morning to the previous post, but thought I'd comment here, too...
ReplyDeleteI am so jealous when I see the space for such large gardens, being in the city.
On the other hand, I'm amazing at how much good stuff can be grown in smaller plots that are intensively worked.
A recent concern: what are the chances that government actions, rules, or laws of some kind will interfere with people's attempts at growing more of their own food? Didn't FDR attempt to keep food prices high in the Great Depression by controlling farmer's ability to grow grain, even for their own use?
What about the new food safety initiates?
You are right, the world won't come to end if "every other home has a garden like these."
But that's not going to happen: many dense urban areas will never be able to garden on this scale. Peak Oil is going to throw food delivery (and production) networks into disarray.
What if people don't have the money (due to unemployment or inflation) to buy food, or even secure basic shelter and the space to grow food? Will we end up with mass migrations or mass homelessness? Who would feed such a mass of dispossessed humanity?
Are my concerns just alarmist, doom-and-gloom nonsense?
I am very pessimistic right now, regarding the state of awareness of the majority. Our neighbors are nice people with a 2 year old themselves, but the mother was complaining the other day about the amount of work requires for her tiny garden with three tomato plants and a few pea vines.
I am not so pessimistic, provided the rate of change is slow. Price incentive is likely to move things along very quickly.
ReplyDeleteYou can't garden enough to feed yourself, and you don't need to. If gardeners grew 25% of the U.S. current production of vegetables, that would make up for any decline from industrial farms.
Raising animals is not very difficult or time or resource consuming.
All of this does require that WE actually do do it.
Hi Greg. I don't know if you're still watching for comments on this somewhat old blog posting, but I'll take a shot anyway, even though I did see the post back in June when it was fresher and probably should have commented back then.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I've noticed the same phenomenon around the suburbs and exurbs of Boston as well. That is, homes seem to come in two flavors, tract (read new McMansions) or old-timey as you put it. The flavor of one's home determines more than the landscaping, as it also determines whether one opens the windows on marginally warm 70-something degree days, or runs the AC, whether one has and uses a clothesline (oh the horror!), and so on. The funny thing is that wealth doesn't always seem to indicate a favoratism for things like heavy-handed AC use or lack of clotheslines. Instead, it seems that a buyer of a home picks a flavor of a home's lifestyle when they buy it and then take that flavor as a given. That is, buyers of older homes keep the clothesline. New house owners freak out at clothelines. (I'm ignoring the fact that some hew homes could come under homeowner association bans of such things as, around here, the only HOAs are usually in condo developments.)
Additionally owners of a tract home act as if all the windows are screwed shut.
It's strange but also a bit sad as the old-timey homes are slowly coming down and being converted to new, gentrified, tract, McMansion things.
Just stumbled on ths blog -- I live in Tennessee. How you start it back.
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