Our Organic Victory Garden
August 17, 2008 – 7:26 am
Trish and Kathy's Organic Victory Garden
Last night I had the pleasure of beginning Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. If you haven’t heard about it, the book is about the author’s familial journey back to cooperative sustainability. In her words, it’s a story about “how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water and breathed the air.”
In the first chapter she makes a declaration that astounded me. “Americans consume 400 gallons of oil per person per year in agriculture.” Now, we’ve all heard that the average piece of produce we purchase at the Piggly Wiggly (or other grocery store) travels at least 1500 miles from where it was grown to where it is purchased, but I had never put that into a consumptive equivalent before now. She goes further to state that if everyone would purchase locally, organically grown food for only 1 meal per week, as a nation, we would reduce our oil consumption by 1.1 million barrels of oil per week.
Can you imagine. Most of you who know me, know that I could go on and on about the benefits of growing your own food or buying organically grown local produce from the farmer’s market. Today, I’ll spare you the philosophical lecture. I think it’s more important to consider the above facts.
In this election year everyone is talking about each candidate’s top down solution to solve our dependence on foreign oil. “Blah, blah, blah,” promises, promises. What I wish they would talk about are REAL solutions from the bottom up. I was born right after Kennedy died but his words lived on the wall of our Irish Catholic house.
Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
What I believe we can do is return to victory gardening. It’s easy. It’s fun and it gives us back our freedom not to mention our dignity. Attached is a photo of our victory garden. It was built from reclaimed wood, i.e. other people’s trash. In this small space, in one season we have grown enough fresh food to reduce our grocery bills at least $70.00 per week. We also canned 4 cases of beans, 12 quarts of tomatoes and enough extras to share with my entire office. All without chemical sprays or miracle grow.
If we can do it, you can do it. I invite you to at least try.
