victory gardens

Damn, I wish I'd written this! John Michael Greer takes up the Victory Garden, and puts it in its proper place - economically, politically, socially - and for zombie slaying. What's not to love? And I think he has it pretty much exactly right here - that while growing your own is never the solution to all problems, it often does mediate our potential suffering - which is why as long as there has been modernity it has been a solution to its difficulties. (Before the Victory Garden movement, there was the British cottage garden movement, a direct response to the disruptions of early…

In a recent previous post "Do You Have to Grow Food" I pointed out that the impact of urban gardening is vastly greater, in the aggregate, than most people believe. We tend to think that little gardens here and there make no difference, but in fact, they add up rapidly. Consider the impact of US Victory Gardens in WWII, for example - in 1944, US Victory gardens, which averaged only about 350 square feet, grew fully half the produce for the US. That is, home gardeners grew as much produce as all the vegetable farms in the US at the time. While it may seem, intuitively that small gardens…