For those who love life in the Mountains.
Lawns To Gardens
A new social movement is sweeping America. People are beginning to take a second look at their lawns. Economic and scientific attitudes have moved on and it is beginning to make sense that we should do things differently. Closely clipped expanses of sun drenched grass have not always been with us. In fact lawns did not take root in America as a status symbol til the Industrial revolution was well begun. Here's an excerpt from "The History Of Lawns" By Virginia Scott Jenkins. http://www.american-lawns.com/history/history_lawn.html to fill you in on how it happened.
But now, for a variety of reasons, Americans are looking at that grassy expanse in a different way. Below is a list of reasons it is a good idea to dig up that turf and plant vegetables using organic intensive bed growing.
1. In the Smoky Mountains the three primary sources of ground and soil pollution are lawns, automobiles, and municipal waste, in that order. Runoff of over used and improperly applied pesticides and chemical fertilizers contaminate every pond and stream and are beginning to soak into wells and aquifers.
2. In the Smoky Mountains flat land is at a premium and delicate forest habitat is dwindling at an alarming rate. Lawns represent an area carved out of the forest and maintained artificially with an alien species. Soil compaction from machine mowing guarantees massive runoff.
3. The engines of lawn mowers and other lawn maintenance equipment contribute significantly to air pollution.
4. Currently the produce we put on our tables is shipped thousands of miles to our supermarket, often in refrigerated trucks that use diesel to move the product and keep it fresh. Our primary source of air pollution in the Smokies is cars and trucks. Most of the produce shipped in this manner could just as well be grown right here, dispensing with a significant percentage of the smog. Growing even a percentage of our own food locally would lower demand on strained fuel supplies for the nation.
5. "Same Day Delivery," of food supplies means that our supermarkets have no more than 2-3 days of food on their shelves. Should some disaster occur that cut off that continuous stream of trucks for more than a week the cost of bringing emergency supplies into the region would be catastrophic.
6. Industrial Agriculture requires that most of the nutritional value be milled from foods in order to improve shelf life. In America obesity and diabetes, among other conditions, have reached the proportions of modern plagues. Fresh, "just picked" produce, grown without chemicals is superior in every way. If you love your children you will want to feed them always with fresh, pure food.
7. Industrial Agriculture is dependent at every level on petrochemicals. Fuel for tractors, feedstock for pesticides, fertilizers, drugs, and plastics, are all petrochemical based. As demand exceeds supply the cost of petrochemicals is raising the cost of food across the board. Every tomato you grow at home organically is a tomato that has NOT been planted, sprayed, fertilized, shipped, and refrigerated using petrochemicals. America's imports 60% of it's petrochemical feedstock from distant and unstable regions of the Earth. Anything we can do to reduce that dependency on foreign supplies strengthens America. Growing a garden in your lawn is patriotic.
8. Inherent in Industrial Agriculture is the problem of mass contamination. Alternatively no bunch of spinach plucked from your home plot is EVER going to be contaminated with a virulent and deadly strain of E. Coli cultured in Mexican feedlots. The ONLY way to truly know what is in your food is to grow it yourself or personally know who grew it for you locally.
9. Modern "No Till", "Square Foot," organic gardening has advanced astonishingly in the last decade. Using these techniques non-experts can grow as much a five times per acre the amount of harvest produced by chemically based farming, without any more input than kitchen scraps, animal waste, and TLC. A properly balanced organic garden can be cropped continuously indefinitely while the soil quality only improves. (The drawback is that it can take 3-5 years to bring soils up to "optimum" production.)
10. For poor families a kitchen garden is like giving yourself a raise. We spend thousands of dollars per year on produce of various kinds from the supermarket. Every tomato we grow is a tomato we DIDN'T drive to town and buy from the supermarket with cash. The cash we would have spent is now freed to use elsewhere. For some this will amount to thousands of dollars a year. No selling, no boss, no business records or bank loan. Of course growing surplus and selling it to your neighbors is another possibility.
11. Once the beds are made raised bed organic gardening is simple and non-strenuous. Perfect for young children, the Elderly, or disabled. Gardening is recognized world wide as the perfect therapy for recovery of patients from both physical and psychic trauma. Giving children a "grassroots" understanding of how to produce their own food is one of the greatest gifts we can give in preparing them for life as adults.
12. A carefully planned mature vegetable garden can be just a beautiful as any flower garden, raises the value of the property, and can become the envy of all your neighbors.
13. Once, the Smoky Mountains were known for the unique flavors and cuisine of it's locally produced foods. Now it all comes from the big Central Warehouse and tastes the same as it would in New York or San Fransisco. Tourism would only benefit if local restaurants took on the European habit of choosing their Gardeners as carefully as they choose their Cooks.
14. Yearly money is spent of food and produce in Sevier and Cocke Counties that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars. This doesn't include what is spent in restaurants by tourists. Currently that money immediately shoots across the country to industrial centers like Houston and Miami. It is said that the prosperity of a region is dependent on how many times a dollar spent there circulates in the region before it goes somewhere else. By growing our own, and buying from local farmers, we can substantially improve the regional economy, creating jobs, lowering costs, and improving health across the board.
15. Currently our produce is entirely dependent on a very short list of plant varieties. And that list is getting shorter every year. This makes us very vulnerable to pesticide resistant insects and microbes. (Anybody remember the Great Potato Blight in Ireland?) Once we had an endless variety of plants each with it's own unique growing characteristics and flavors. Over thousands of years gardeners and farmers had created this stock of seed types and it is the heritage of all mankind. By the simple act of growing a garden and sharing seed with your neighbors we can preserve and improve this heritage for the future and for our children and their children.
16. With the current economic woes county Food Banks and Pantries are scraping the bottom. Demand for Food Stamps have tripled in the last five years and trends indicate that we will soon face a moment when the system is swamped and collapses. Rather than wait for that to happen it would be better to encourage anyone with a patch of land to plant and learn how to produce at least a portion of their own food.
17. We are blessed in this area with a high percentage of Elderly. These are people with perfected skills and decades of experience. Farmers, Gardeners, Arborealists, experts in animal husbandry and wildgathering, people who know how to dress a hog, prepare a feast from scratch, or make preserves. Most of whom would be delighted to be called upon to teach those skills to a new generation. A splendid resource which we will lose if we do not use.
I can think of more, but for now seventeen is enough.
So...have you started a garden yet?
But now, for a variety of reasons, Americans are looking at that grassy expanse in a different way. Below is a list of reasons it is a good idea to dig up that turf and plant vegetables using organic intensive bed growing.
1. In the Smoky Mountains the three primary sources of ground and soil pollution are lawns, automobiles, and municipal waste, in that order. Runoff of over used and improperly applied pesticides and chemical fertilizers contaminate every pond and stream and are beginning to soak into wells and aquifers.
2. In the Smoky Mountains flat land is at a premium and delicate forest habitat is dwindling at an alarming rate. Lawns represent an area carved out of the forest and maintained artificially with an alien species. Soil compaction from machine mowing guarantees massive runoff.
3. The engines of lawn mowers and other lawn maintenance equipment contribute significantly to air pollution.
4. Currently the produce we put on our tables is shipped thousands of miles to our supermarket, often in refrigerated trucks that use diesel to move the product and keep it fresh. Our primary source of air pollution in the Smokies is cars and trucks. Most of the produce shipped in this manner could just as well be grown right here, dispensing with a significant percentage of the smog. Growing even a percentage of our own food locally would lower demand on strained fuel supplies for the nation.
5. "Same Day Delivery," of food supplies means that our supermarkets have no more than 2-3 days of food on their shelves. Should some disaster occur that cut off that continuous stream of trucks for more than a week the cost of bringing emergency supplies into the region would be catastrophic.
6. Industrial Agriculture requires that most of the nutritional value be milled from foods in order to improve shelf life. In America obesity and diabetes, among other conditions, have reached the proportions of modern plagues. Fresh, "just picked" produce, grown without chemicals is superior in every way. If you love your children you will want to feed them always with fresh, pure food.
7. Industrial Agriculture is dependent at every level on petrochemicals. Fuel for tractors, feedstock for pesticides, fertilizers, drugs, and plastics, are all petrochemical based. As demand exceeds supply the cost of petrochemicals is raising the cost of food across the board. Every tomato you grow at home organically is a tomato that has NOT been planted, sprayed, fertilized, shipped, and refrigerated using petrochemicals. America's imports 60% of it's petrochemical feedstock from distant and unstable regions of the Earth. Anything we can do to reduce that dependency on foreign supplies strengthens America. Growing a garden in your lawn is patriotic.
8. Inherent in Industrial Agriculture is the problem of mass contamination. Alternatively no bunch of spinach plucked from your home plot is EVER going to be contaminated with a virulent and deadly strain of E. Coli cultured in Mexican feedlots. The ONLY way to truly know what is in your food is to grow it yourself or personally know who grew it for you locally.
9. Modern "No Till", "Square Foot," organic gardening has advanced astonishingly in the last decade. Using these techniques non-experts can grow as much a five times per acre the amount of harvest produced by chemically based farming, without any more input than kitchen scraps, animal waste, and TLC. A properly balanced organic garden can be cropped continuously indefinitely while the soil quality only improves. (The drawback is that it can take 3-5 years to bring soils up to "optimum" production.)
10. For poor families a kitchen garden is like giving yourself a raise. We spend thousands of dollars per year on produce of various kinds from the supermarket. Every tomato we grow is a tomato we DIDN'T drive to town and buy from the supermarket with cash. The cash we would have spent is now freed to use elsewhere. For some this will amount to thousands of dollars a year. No selling, no boss, no business records or bank loan. Of course growing surplus and selling it to your neighbors is another possibility.
11. Once the beds are made raised bed organic gardening is simple and non-strenuous. Perfect for young children, the Elderly, or disabled. Gardening is recognized world wide as the perfect therapy for recovery of patients from both physical and psychic trauma. Giving children a "grassroots" understanding of how to produce their own food is one of the greatest gifts we can give in preparing them for life as adults.
12. A carefully planned mature vegetable garden can be just a beautiful as any flower garden, raises the value of the property, and can become the envy of all your neighbors.
13. Once, the Smoky Mountains were known for the unique flavors and cuisine of it's locally produced foods. Now it all comes from the big Central Warehouse and tastes the same as it would in New York or San Fransisco. Tourism would only benefit if local restaurants took on the European habit of choosing their Gardeners as carefully as they choose their Cooks.
14. Yearly money is spent of food and produce in Sevier and Cocke Counties that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars. This doesn't include what is spent in restaurants by tourists. Currently that money immediately shoots across the country to industrial centers like Houston and Miami. It is said that the prosperity of a region is dependent on how many times a dollar spent there circulates in the region before it goes somewhere else. By growing our own, and buying from local farmers, we can substantially improve the regional economy, creating jobs, lowering costs, and improving health across the board.
15. Currently our produce is entirely dependent on a very short list of plant varieties. And that list is getting shorter every year. This makes us very vulnerable to pesticide resistant insects and microbes. (Anybody remember the Great Potato Blight in Ireland?) Once we had an endless variety of plants each with it's own unique growing characteristics and flavors. Over thousands of years gardeners and farmers had created this stock of seed types and it is the heritage of all mankind. By the simple act of growing a garden and sharing seed with your neighbors we can preserve and improve this heritage for the future and for our children and their children.
16. With the current economic woes county Food Banks and Pantries are scraping the bottom. Demand for Food Stamps have tripled in the last five years and trends indicate that we will soon face a moment when the system is swamped and collapses. Rather than wait for that to happen it would be better to encourage anyone with a patch of land to plant and learn how to produce at least a portion of their own food.
17. We are blessed in this area with a high percentage of Elderly. These are people with perfected skills and decades of experience. Farmers, Gardeners, Arborealists, experts in animal husbandry and wildgathering, people who know how to dress a hog, prepare a feast from scratch, or make preserves. Most of whom would be delighted to be called upon to teach those skills to a new generation. A splendid resource which we will lose if we do not use.
I can think of more, but for now seventeen is enough.
So...have you started a garden yet?
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