Holy Subsistence Agriculture, Batman!

Yes, it's been a long time since my last post.

Like, a year and a half.

I started writing everything on paper. I just didn't see the point of putting random, personal information on the internet. I'm not that into myself.

A few months ago, though, I started a garden. Good for me! Awesome! Hooray! Subsequently, I have found that there is a dearth of information related to my very specific question about whether certain things are going to grow or not, or how crazy I am to plant tomatoes in mid-winter. Most of the good answers came from people's personal gardening blogs, so I'm reconstituting this blog with the intent of tracking my garden's progress; maybe it will help someone else with their little slice of Eden.

Why garden, you might ask? It all started when I when to a simulcast global screening of a global warming movie, "The Age of Stupid." The docu-drama is set in an increasingly plausible future where humans fucked up and pissed the planet off and now it has killed most of us off like a bad roach infection. It looks back and says, "yep, we were pretty dumb not to do anything when we had the chance." The creators of the film achieved their goal of making me want to do something about it, but probably not in the way they expected. I'm sure they were hoping to galvanize people into writing their senators in preparation for the upcoming Copenhagen climate talks. I knew that wasn't going anywhere, so I decided to invest in something more practical: the ability to grow my own food. If a man-made apocalypse is coming, then grocery stores are going to be obsolete. I'm going to learn how to feed myself from the earth. Of course, if temperatures rise, it's going to be pretty hard to grow anything anyway. But in the meantime, it lowers my environmental impact and gives me a skill set that will be way more practical than say, banking or real estate.

Long story short, I found out about intensive gardening, especially a method called Square Foot Gardening. I made a bunch of wooden planters and lined the patio with rail planters. I'm growing flowers in the rail planters and vegetables in the wooden planters. On the lower patio I've got a couple of fruit trees (lemon and orange) as well as the beginning of a potted herb garden. I'll post a summary of my progress so far when I have pictures.