Dan Boone wrote:I grow very few calories, but in my opinion my garden still insulates me from rising food prices to an extent. "Just calories" are pretty cheap -- grains and legumes can most of them be found for a buck a pound or less if you shop smart, and a pound goes a long way. If those prices multiplied by ten after several years of bad years for the industrial farms, I could still buy enough calories without much pain. But fruits, greens, vegetables, and herbs are more expensive and likely to go up quicker under bad conditions (I saw celery at six dollars a head at my local grocery not long ago due to, apparently, bad weather in California.) If my garden gives me a bunch of fresh herbs and vegetables, I can devote more of my food budget to the calorie crops that get harvested with million dollar combines. Indeed, my entire growing strategy is focused on replacing the most expensive things in my shopping cart with self-grown produce, and (since I don't eat much meat or dairy or refined oil) those expensive things are almost never full of calories.
Cam Lee wrote:I love this! Fairly recently, I’ve identified community as something really important to me, and I imagine cohousing or an eco village in my future somehow. But then I thought - why wait until I have that project underway to start building community?
The logistics are the hard part. Living in an urban area, I’m wondering how to go about this kind of intentional neighborliness. Knocking on doors doesn’t seem quite the same when we’re all living I apartments and triplexes. Plus with covid-19, I’m not keen to organise an in-person block party. Still brainstorming things to start with in these times... any suggestions welcome :) how do you plan to (intentionally) make those connections?