Grow Your Own Food

Agriculture, or at least industrial agriculture in particular, is one of the leading causes of the creation of greenhouse gasses, habitat and species loss, and desertification around the world. Vast monocrop fields being pounded with agrochemicals, creating profits going mostly to large corporations. The findings of research on the effects of these chemicals on humans is starting to become more widespread, with their effects on the environment already fairly well known. Around the world, deserts are creeping into areas previously cropped with plants that require too much water for the environment. Crops which are grown not for the local people, but to be exported to other nations or areas. There are thousands of miles of fields of grains grown purely to feed the millions of heads of livestock that the increasingly meat crazy developed world has become. It is almost intimidating to think about the size and power of these corporations in terms of financial ability and political power. Yet, we as the all too important consumers can make a difference. Companies do change if the money is not there, not if what they are doing is wrong. If there is money to be made in actually good food, they will go there. Unfortunately the words organic and natural only have slightly law binding uses so it can be quite challenging for consumers to actually know what they are buying. Good food or smart marketing? But why even try and deal with learning the increasingly difficult law abiding vocabulary used by marketing people to ensure you buy their products. 

For a long time, people have become more and more separated from food. How it grows, where it comes from, what it even looks like in its unprocessed natural form. Which is astounding to think about. I know for a fact I didn’t know what a head of cabbage looked like when still attached to its living body and a cabbage doesn’t look too different. There are tons of foods that we wouldn’t recognize if we walked past it. There are kids in cities who don’t make the connection between a living chicken and the chicken nuggets they eat from a fast food place, and that is no fault of their own. This separation has been noticed by many, with people walking the walk to make a difference about it. Urban gardens, garden classes, and thousands of videos on youtube about gardening have begun to help people get started or at least begin to think about it. Covid allowed many people the time to start thinking about food. There were large disturbances in the normal supply flows, restaurants were closed, people had time. However, by the end of covid it had become a joke about how many gardens have been left to grow wild when society kicked back into motion. So what now?

Keep trying to grow food. Even if you don’t have the space, or think you don’t have the space. There are people who have become pretty dedicated to growing food that can grow a good amount of produce on an apartment balcony; a small 4ft by 6ft space. You don’t have to be as dedicated to grow something. Sure it takes some work and some mistakes before you can get to be a little successful, but anybody can do it. If farming your food was so impossible, people would have never started to switch from hunting and gathering and pastoralism to farming. They would have continued to hunt and gather their wild foods. That’s not to say you can’t still do those things and get very nutritious foods from wild sources or combine those wild sources with your own grown food, but that's not what we are talking about today. Maybe another time. What we are talking about today is growing your own food. Even if it doesn't save you that much money to grow a pot of tomatoes or a bag of potatoes, you can and should still do those things. The benefits besides getting delicious home grown foods will be felt.  

Now here’s a big tip for growing your own food. Grow what wants to grow where you live. It is unfortunate that you can’t grow a big mango tree in Canada or that I can’t even grow a fruiting blueberry bush where I live. It’s just not the way it works. Sure, plants can be flexible and aren’t always only able to grow in this one exact condition, but in all likelihood they will grow best there and that’s what you want. Plants that grow their best where you live because those plants will require the least amount of work. If you try to grow big juicy beefsteak tomatoes during the rainy season here on the windward side of Maui, you will not be successful. I don’t care how much you like them. Pests and fungus and any other thing you can think of will not let you. Sure, planning your plants around seasons is a big part of growing food but some things will just not take without a significant amount of effort. I for one prefer to choose the lazy option. Smaller tomatoes, like cherry and grape tomatoes especially, fare much better here. We can’t grow big onions here because it doesn’t get cold enough to cause the creation of a large bulb. Green onions and chives on the other hand can be grown quite well here. So the first big step is figuring out what actually grows in your area. There are charts for zone hardiness, blogs, and lists all over the place that can tell you this. You can even ask a neighbor or see what a farm nearby is growing. Or if you really can’t be bothered to do any of those things just buy some seeds and toss them in the dirt and see what takes. The seeds will tell you what grows and what doesn’t. If you buy perennials, which are plants that live longer than 2 years, then you can be really lazy because once they become established, they require much less care than your annual vegetables. This is one reason why food forests are a great food system which was talked about in a previous blog of ours: “what is a food forest”.

Now that you’ve started to get some garden beds ready or some pots and planted a bunch of seeds or bought starts from a nursery. You may be able to harvest a good amount of food at first. Or maybe you’ve been stumped as to why some things grew and others didn’t. Hopefully this means that you are now getting interested. Again you can look up all sorts of ways to get things going in a better direction or ask some more advice from that friendly neighbor who gave you some seeds. Or you can start to experiment. Start saving your seeds. Now, not everyone may be up for this aspect of growing at first. It does require some more effort. Paying closer attention, buying more types of seeds (we will get into this further down), maybe preparing the gardening space differently. What this allows you to do is take power back into your own hands. Growing your own food is one thing, but continuing to collect the seeds from each harvest and replanting really takes the power away from large industrial agriculture companies. Seed saving does require some more work unfortunately but again it's not impossible. People have been saving seeds for thousands of years without the use of climate controlled rooms or perfect conditions. But there are some caveats to doing this. We now have to consider genetics. That thing you may have heard of in school and thought you’d never need to worry about again. When you buy a seed packet of this one type of corn or this one type of carrot, you are buying a plant that exists as it does because a large enough population of that type of plant were grown near each other when flowering without a different type in the proximity. Corn is the prime example of this due to its promiscuous nature. A stalk of say, Hawaiian sugar sweet corn, when starting to flower will cross with as many other corn stalks as are around. If there are not enough around, then inbreeding occurs and a generation or two down the line, you have a plant that can barely even survive, let alone produce a significant amount of food. Corn requires at least 200 individual plants of the same type, in this case Hawaiian sugar sweet corn, to ensure that there is enough genetic diversity to keep the following generation healthy and to keep the variety what it is. Other plants require less but still a significant amount. You might be thinking, who has the space or stomach for 200 plants of corn? You may not have caught it but I said 200 plants of that one type of corn. So what if you have multiple types of corn. That is where seed saving starts to get fun. 

Earlier we mentioned choosing plants that fit your environment but even then not all plants that should grow where you live do. Maybe only one of the pepper seeds you planted germinated and grew to produce any number of peppers. If you collect seeds from those peppers and plant those, you may have a few plants this time that survive to produce peppers. However after a few generations of this you will begin to lose your success due to what we just talked about, genetics. You are creating an inbred plant. Sure you were selecting for traits that fit your environment by saving seeds from the healthiest peppers, but you were selecting from an increasingly shrunken gene pool. That is where landrace gardening comes in and where seed saving becomes really fun and effective. Back to your pepper plants. Instead of buying pepper seeds of one type of pepper, you buy pepper seeds of 10 different types of pepper. Preferably of types that are more likely to have success where you live, at least off the bat. Then you plant them all and let them cross pollinate (I should say, not all plants cross pollinate as much as corn; for example, tomatoes cross pollinate very little, peppers a fair amount to see a change in genetics). Some will survive, some won’t, but the survivors that make it to flowering will cross with the others around. They will produce the peppers of the seed types that you bought like bell shaped peppers and thin long peppers etc. When you harvest those peppers and save the seeds and mix them up before you plant (for the fun of surprise), the next generation is going to have a mix of genetics from all or some of the others that were grown before. Now you’ve taken a large diverse gene pool, and allowed those that could survive in your area to cross. The next generation should be more adapted to your area with a mix of the characteristics from the previous parents. Some still might die but more will likely survive than the generation before. With this second generation, you can grow more varieties if you like to add more genes into the pool or continue to grow out the original cross. It is up to you, that is the fun of it. By the third generation you can begin to see a new pepper taking shape. One that doesn’t really fit into any of the types of the seeds you bought at first. On top of that, you added so much genetic diversity that you don’t need so many plants crossing to keep them healthy. In the case of corn, you can plant less than 200. From there the world is your oyster. You can select for traits you like, like bigger peppers, certain colors, etc. Or you can keep the genetics flowing by adding in new types of pepper. Believe me, you could probably spend many years doing this before you run out of options for new pepper types, but you can begin adding back the heirloom or whatever types you had from the beginning and still increase the genetic diversity. 

This whole process is a bit more work but it can create food that grows like a weed. Which is what everyone wants. The most food, the easiest way. You’ll have created a garden of new varieties of vegetables that are easy to grow and provide lots of nutritious foods and you’ll be helping the planet by not supporting the industrial agricultural complex which is what this article was talking about before we started rambling on about plants. It’s really a win-win. For those who are more on the nerdy side of doing this, there are plenty of resources like books, articles, blogs, and videos. Many people who are much more knowledgeable about this subject than me. All that being said, the best thing is to just go do it, get a little dirty, and have fun.