I'm planting a garden because I plant a garden every year. Well, I've been doing it for the past 25 years or so anyway. I've gotten quite good with production. I shudder at the thought of a bunch of noobs going out and starting a garden, but hey, I was a noob once too and I learned. My biggest advice for a beginner is to consider your approach to pest control. That means identifying the pests in your area, both bugs and animals, and whether you want to use chemicals or natural methods. Seeing as how I eat produce I prefer using natural methods but you have to realize they're not as effective and you will suffer losses. Sometimes those losses can be severe - you'd be amazed at the amount of damage squirrels, rabbits, crows, and various beetles can do to a garden in short order! The cool thing is you're going to learn about all kinds of new insects you never even knew existed happily munching away on all your produce! Enjoy!
I do it because some things are wildly overpriced at the grocery. Like, there's no use in planting cucumbers when they are $0.50 at the grocery. But fresh herbs are like $3 a bunch and berries can be $3-5 a lb, so it can make good financial sense to plant some of these.
An herb garden and planter will produce easily $100 worth of herbs over a season for nothing more than 20 minutes of planting, then regular watering and tending. I had so much basil last year that I literally ate it in salad.
Berry bushes can be a little more expensive, like $20-50. But they also yield crazy amounts of fruit over the season and grow in like 95% of the USA.
It's a good investment, and it's a nice way to get some out doors time everyday.
I'm planting one because its the most relaxing and rewarding thing for me. Something about watching things slowly grow after tending to them for months is very rewarding. Also they don't sell all the kinds of produce you can grow. Heirloom varietals taste so much better then the mass market kinds.
We're not planting because we fear shortages now, but independent of our current predicament there's a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that there _could_ be shortages in our lifetime (most likely climate induced, directly or indirectly) and the time to learn is now, not when the shelves are empty.
Also, it's fun and gets us away from screens for a day.
F-ing A. I haven't left the house in three weeks and have a year of basic food (3 months of most things). To me, people who continue at this time the European-style habits of shopping at markets every 1-2 days or even every 1-2 weeks like most Americans are dangerously stupid.
Also, after waiting on Instacart customer support for 6 hours today without anyone answering or resolution to missing, damaged goods, and wrong quantities in a single order, even though they're YC alum, I can't honestly use them again (sorry folks). I'd rather make a trip to the markets every 6 months in indirect vent/non-vented goggles and a solid N95 NIOSH mask than pay someone else $60 to buy terrible produce and throw bags onto the ground without any care.
PS: We're "autoclaving" the mail at 170 F for 30 minutes to denature any enveloped virus "guests" and letting packages rest in the garage for 4 days before handling them.
It’s not quite planting season yet here (frost risk until the end of May), but my wife is laid off and wants to do a garden this year to save a little bit of money and have something to do with her time until the entertainment industry is allowed to do stuff again.
We've started making bread every night for the next day, and I've heard many of my friends are doing this. It's better than what we get in the local bakeries (we don't live in France) and have already discussed continuing to bake now that we figured out some easy tricks. We started here :
https://andyljones.com/posts/bread.html
We had 10 pots on the patio last summer, growing cilantro, parsley, green beans, stevia, potatoes, basil, swiss chard, etc.
Drip irrigation tubes attached to a timer faucet watered it every morning automatically. At some point I'm going to try to hook in a Pi or Arduino so I can remotely control the irrigation, e.g. if it's raining I won't have to go outside & manually shut it off.
We'll be doing that again, and this spring we're also planning to plant a couple of rows of potatoes, carrots, and lettuce. Growing food is not difficult, but it does require some knowledge and understanding of soil pH, pest control, etc. Fortunately there are plenty of how-to videos these days.
The food you grow in an organic, chemical free environment tastes fresh and pure, is good for you, educational for the children, and very satisfying. It may not pay for itself in the first couple of years, but over time you'll find that it's well worth it. Freshly grown potatoes taste incredible.
We are thinking of getting chickens, but it may or may not happen this spring. Self-sufficiency takes a lot of work, but partial sufficiency is quite attainable for many people. Even if you're in an urban apartment, there are hydroponic devices and grow lamps to help you grow considerable veggies. I suppose we can thank the pot industry for that.
>Growing food is not difficult, but it does require some knowledge
I'd push back on the first part of this lightly. Growing some food is not difficult. Growing food effectively however, in quantity and for a long period of time, does require a fair bit of experience and local knowledge that you just can't get in one season. My family gardened heavily growing up, and I've been gardening extensively since my mid 20's (late 30's now), and I would say I only now truly feel like I 'get it' with regards to many aspects of planting, harvesting, timing, and preservation.
Prior to the pandemic, my goal this summer was to have my house be 'food-independent' for 3 months of this year. I've revised that goal to try and get to food independence by end of spring and maintain that through the end of fall and into winter.
My argument would be that gardening has a very low barrier to entry: literally any one can (and should) have a garden. However, the top skill cap on gardening is very high and does take time to achieve. Its also not something that can be entirely short-cutted through self learning/ study. How you grow depends on where you are and the details of your particular garden. Nothing else but experience will get you there.
> At some point I'm going to try to hook in a Pi or Arduino so I can remotely control the irrigation, e.g. if it's raining I won't have to go outside & manually shut it off.
I mean do it if it's fun, but you can just buy something that does this at home depot.
I wonder if the people planting vegetables are aware of just how much they would need to plant in order to supply even a small fraction of someone's required calories. I mean, there's a good reason we've centralized food production into massively efficient enormous farms with heavily mechanised harvesting.
For my family and me it's not about calories, it's about nutrition. Vegetables are an excellent source of all kinds of vitamins and minerals, especially ones grown in quality soil with quality seeds. It's also about fiber. We get our calories from fats and protein.
100% this is correct. We have 10 raised beds that are 4'x16', and we supply probably 1/2 of what we need for the year for a family of 3. We're super efficient and good at this, too.
I look at growing a garden like washing your hands for this current situation. It won't prevent starvation if the world turns into Fury Road but it can meaningfully move the needle in aggregate and reduce pressure on strained supply chains.
Food isn't just about calories. Fresh fruits and veggies are desirable for good health. Even a small garden producing a small amount of tasty, fresh produce forms a good complement to shelf-stable rice, dried beans, etc.
Enormous farms do not optimize yield per hectare, they optimize total amount of land being utilized. Maximizing yields over land is very labor intensive and you would be surprised how productive you can get a garden to be.
We only did that for staples, because we have ways to easily mechanically harvest huge quantities of them. We went from a man with a scythe harvesting an acre of wheat per day, to a man with a combine with a 45 foot header harvesting 600 acres of wheat per day. Vegetables are still harvested by hand. With vegetables we have gone from 4 workers harvesting an acre per day to 4 workers harvesting an acre per day.
A whole family doesn't even need one acre to grow all their grains, fruits and vegetables, so the labor really isn't a big deal.
Farm.bot have some calculations on their website [1]. They claim that a 2000 calories/day of vegetables only can be grown using 110-205 m^2. But even vegetarians eat grains etc , so assuming 3 cups of veggies per day, one person needs 7 m^2.
Exactly. The only people who think "farming" sounds like fun are people who never farmed for a living. It is fine if you enjoy fresh tomatoes or whatever but it isn't a replacement for your grocery store trips. Even if you go big enough to grow enough, you are going to spend a lot of time canning too.
Before potatoes getting enough food from crops was very difficult. Wheat was common in Europe but the amount of work to get calories from wheat is intense. After potatoes it's much much easier to get a lot of calories from a small amount of land. Thank you South America!
Yeah, be prepared for some disappointment. I've been growing vegetables in my backyard now for about five years. I usually get a lot of jalapenos, some spices, and maybe a handful of tomatos, cucumbers and zucchinis. Plus it takes months before anything edible appears at all.
Tangential topic, but does anyone have a good no-nonsense evidence based source for how to make bread and/or sourdough?
I've been trying sourdough and it's crazy how many contradictory pieces of advice and explanations you read e.g. if the yeast comes from the initial flour or air, what ratio of flour + water to feed it with, how many times a day you feed the starter, how many times you let the dough prove. It generally indicates to me that the process is very forgiving though (as so many variations work).
I would have thought most myths would have been put to bed by now as it should be relatively easy to run cooking experiments if you want to debunk something.
Being in lockdown has enabled me to really focus on our vegetable garden this year. Am even getting into weeding which is not normally something I enjoy.
This. I used to grow veg before commuting and children got in the way. Last time I tried I didn't have the time to keep on top of the weeds. I hope that now we are all at home all the time, I'll be able to do a bit of hoeing any day I like.
I run tech at a small farming and gardening supply company in Maine. We’ve seen order volume jump 2-300% in the past few weeks. We’ve done several VPS upgrades to handle the increased traffic, and our order number allocation system has broken down several times recently. Our digital infrastructure is keeping up now, but we’re all still scrambling to keep the staff healthy and safe as we all work to get the orders out the door safely and responsibly.
I hope this convinces people to become more self-sufficient overall and grow a little of their own food. Living farther out from dense urban cores on more land will help, and conveniently, it will also make one less likely to fall ill. Telecommuting will hopefully enable people to live much less densely and avoid something like this recurring at its present scale.
The climate impact of individuals living in the city vs those living in the suburbs is considerable. More people living away from the city increases deforestation and is a net negative as far as lifestyle is concerned. Telecommuting is a nice option but most businesses don't work that way. I work in the commercial arts world. A lot of it is sensory stimuli and requires paying butts in seats. I can't dropship an experience through Amazon working from bungalow in Chiang Mai.
It's great if you can efficiently do it and actually use the results. If you have free time, or kids to help out, I think gardening can be a great hobby and help supplement your nutrition. I think it takes some practice to get right. Fertilization, bug control, selecting varieties, site selection and preparation... My past attempts at gardening have reminded me of the comparative advantage of outsourcing my food supply. Even when my garden has done well, I struggled to eat the results(weeks of non-stop zucchini gets old), and didn't have the time for preservation.
I love gardening. Have a lot of really fond memories of playing in my mom's garden (despite terrible allergies) while she was working on it. Tomatoes, rhubarb, raspberries, all sorts of other spices and nectar plants for things like bees and hummingbirds. One summer memory in particular sticks with me, because it was probably my first lesson in the scientific method. Mom's hollyhock plants came down with what ended up being a bad case of rust[1]. We changed the watering routine, fertilizer...nothing worked. This was before google and all that, so we first went to the library and got some gardening books. Went out and compared pictures, but none were exactly the same. Next I clipped some leaves from the plants and we went down to the garden shop a few blocks away and, sure enough, the guy behind the counter (kicking myself I can't remember his name, probably 85 or so with crystal white hair) gave the diagnosis and recommended cutting off all the affected leaves and burning them. Saved the whole lot!
Unfortunately, because of work, I live in a city now and that means ... no yard with a garden. The wife also loves gardening. Anyone have any tips for setting something up in an apartment with a balcony? Irrigation is my primary concern.
You can make self watering pots with 5 gallons buckets, their lid, a pipe, and an old T-shirt. But if you’re not going away, you can simply water every day.
There is not a shortage issue, there is a logistics issue.
The logistics issue is that we have commercial and retail supply chains that are Apples & Oranges level different in terms of getting end consumers what they need.
For instance:
1) Commercial Offices - why is toilet paper disappearing especially in big cities? It's not the production side that's failing. It's that a huge amount of toilet paper is bought and distributed by commercial contract stockers. The supply chain has NOT adjusted to get commercially stocked toilet paper to retail centers. And making it worse commercial distributors are FORBIDDEN to sell to retail in many cases! So now you're dealing with a supply chain + beurocratic issue. There are Mt. Everest sized stocks of commercial TP sitting in warehouses all over America.
2) Commercial Restaurants - These establishments fed the MAJORITY of office workers in major cities up until 3 weeks ago. Commercial restaurant supply chains are reeling - they have stock sitting on shelves and are trying to figure out how to get it into the retail supply chain with similar beurocratic and logistics issues.
There is not a food / grocery shortage and there is unlikely to be a food / grocery shortage in the USA.
But it is going to take some time to sort out how to adjust to this new normal.
And inevitably as soon as we figure it out the pendulum will swing the other way :)
I received my Permaculture Design Certificate from Bill Mollison, my Permaculture for Aid Workers from Geoff Lawton, designed two properties, both included food forests, and I also like long walks on the beach and sushi. WHO’S HIRING APRIL 2020. Joke aside, gardens not only provide food, I’ve found they act as an anti-depressant and are quite fun to build.
One principle of Permaculture is to optimize space to provide for human needs. I feel like the HN community could come up with some cool shit in this space.
Made a good penny selling my tomato starts this year. More than covered my seed purchases for our garden (not due to coronavirus, I just like gardening and splurged on them this year).
I’m curious if the Feds will start to crack down on this kind of behavior. Think of the impact on veggie prices once a good portion of Americans are growing their own food. The New Deal already showed the US could come in a demand you pay fines for not buying crops you don’t need. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
[+] [-] taylodl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mywittyname|6 years ago|reply
An herb garden and planter will produce easily $100 worth of herbs over a season for nothing more than 20 minutes of planting, then regular watering and tending. I had so much basil last year that I literally ate it in salad.
Berry bushes can be a little more expensive, like $20-50. But they also yield crazy amounts of fruit over the season and grow in like 95% of the USA.
It's a good investment, and it's a nice way to get some out doors time everyday.
[+] [-] dkhenry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|6 years ago|reply
Also, it's fun and gets us away from screens for a day.
[+] [-] doggodad|6 years ago|reply
Also, after waiting on Instacart customer support for 6 hours today without anyone answering or resolution to missing, damaged goods, and wrong quantities in a single order, even though they're YC alum, I can't honestly use them again (sorry folks). I'd rather make a trip to the markets every 6 months in indirect vent/non-vented goggles and a solid N95 NIOSH mask than pay someone else $60 to buy terrible produce and throw bags onto the ground without any care.
PS: We're "autoclaving" the mail at 170 F for 30 minutes to denature any enveloped virus "guests" and letting packages rest in the garage for 4 days before handling them.
[+] [-] pvaldes|6 years ago|reply
Another correct reason. Is better to spend 2 hours working in the garden than driving to the market. More time to live.
[+] [-] markkanof|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyarkles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] miguelrochefort|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telesilla|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|6 years ago|reply
Drip irrigation tubes attached to a timer faucet watered it every morning automatically. At some point I'm going to try to hook in a Pi or Arduino so I can remotely control the irrigation, e.g. if it's raining I won't have to go outside & manually shut it off.
We'll be doing that again, and this spring we're also planning to plant a couple of rows of potatoes, carrots, and lettuce. Growing food is not difficult, but it does require some knowledge and understanding of soil pH, pest control, etc. Fortunately there are plenty of how-to videos these days.
The food you grow in an organic, chemical free environment tastes fresh and pure, is good for you, educational for the children, and very satisfying. It may not pay for itself in the first couple of years, but over time you'll find that it's well worth it. Freshly grown potatoes taste incredible.
We are thinking of getting chickens, but it may or may not happen this spring. Self-sufficiency takes a lot of work, but partial sufficiency is quite attainable for many people. Even if you're in an urban apartment, there are hydroponic devices and grow lamps to help you grow considerable veggies. I suppose we can thank the pot industry for that.
[+] [-] RosanaAnaDana|6 years ago|reply
I'd push back on the first part of this lightly. Growing some food is not difficult. Growing food effectively however, in quantity and for a long period of time, does require a fair bit of experience and local knowledge that you just can't get in one season. My family gardened heavily growing up, and I've been gardening extensively since my mid 20's (late 30's now), and I would say I only now truly feel like I 'get it' with regards to many aspects of planting, harvesting, timing, and preservation.
Prior to the pandemic, my goal this summer was to have my house be 'food-independent' for 3 months of this year. I've revised that goal to try and get to food independence by end of spring and maintain that through the end of fall and into winter.
My argument would be that gardening has a very low barrier to entry: literally any one can (and should) have a garden. However, the top skill cap on gardening is very high and does take time to achieve. Its also not something that can be entirely short-cutted through self learning/ study. How you grow depends on where you are and the details of your particular garden. Nothing else but experience will get you there.
[+] [-] tathougies|6 years ago|reply
I mean do it if it's fun, but you can just buy something that does this at home depot.
[+] [-] Bukhmanizer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myself248|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Loughla|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wins32767|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenocyon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danharaj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdkjh345fd|6 years ago|reply
A whole family doesn't even need one acre to grow all their grains, fruits and vegetables, so the labor really isn't a big deal.
[+] [-] glup|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://farm.bot/pages/yield
[+] [-] snarf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikedilger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyuudou|6 years ago|reply
They have enough surplus to sell to local restaurants to the tune of about 20,000$/year to supplement their income.
They use a lot of techniques handed down from antiquity, apparently.
Shh, don't tell the eugenicists masquerading as environmentalists and conservationists!
[+] [-] seanwilson|6 years ago|reply
I've been trying sourdough and it's crazy how many contradictory pieces of advice and explanations you read e.g. if the yeast comes from the initial flour or air, what ratio of flour + water to feed it with, how many times a day you feed the starter, how many times you let the dough prove. It generally indicates to me that the process is very forgiving though (as so many variations work).
I would have thought most myths would have been put to bed by now as it should be relatively easy to run cooking experiments if you want to debunk something.
[+] [-] ctack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frobozz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crcarter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] big_chungus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikedilger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 01100011|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remarkEon|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, because of work, I live in a city now and that means ... no yard with a garden. The wife also loves gardening. Anyone have any tips for setting something up in an apartment with a balcony? Irrigation is my primary concern.
[1] https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/flowers/hollyhoc...
[+] [-] ornornor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Madmallard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aresant|6 years ago|reply
The logistics issue is that we have commercial and retail supply chains that are Apples & Oranges level different in terms of getting end consumers what they need.
For instance:
1) Commercial Offices - why is toilet paper disappearing especially in big cities? It's not the production side that's failing. It's that a huge amount of toilet paper is bought and distributed by commercial contract stockers. The supply chain has NOT adjusted to get commercially stocked toilet paper to retail centers. And making it worse commercial distributors are FORBIDDEN to sell to retail in many cases! So now you're dealing with a supply chain + beurocratic issue. There are Mt. Everest sized stocks of commercial TP sitting in warehouses all over America.
2) Commercial Restaurants - These establishments fed the MAJORITY of office workers in major cities up until 3 weeks ago. Commercial restaurant supply chains are reeling - they have stock sitting on shelves and are trying to figure out how to get it into the retail supply chain with similar beurocratic and logistics issues.
There is not a food / grocery shortage and there is unlikely to be a food / grocery shortage in the USA.
But it is going to take some time to sort out how to adjust to this new normal.
And inevitably as soon as we figure it out the pendulum will swing the other way :)
[+] [-] dylanz|6 years ago|reply
One principle of Permaculture is to optimize space to provide for human needs. I feel like the HN community could come up with some cool shit in this space.
[+] [-] tathougies|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virmundi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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