Original Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/3c1f00f8ba5b/strange-roots-managing-expectations
If you’re here, it’s probably for a couple of reasons:
1. You’re aware that the world is a diaper fire.
and
2. You’ve seen people shouting GROW YOUR OWN FOOD!!!! on social media nonstop since January 20th.
That’s part of why I’m here. I’ve seen a lot of misinformation and bad advice being thrown around. I see it every time something untoward happens in our country, which is constantly. Hurray for ✨unprecedented times✨.
I see it about food production. I see it about plant medicine. I see weird gatekeeping about both of these things. I’m too neurodivergent to sit back and watch people be loudly wrong, I’m too community minded to do nothing, and I truly believe that plant cultivation and use is a fundamental human trait that should be taught to every single person, and that the more people know about it, the better off we’re all going to be.
Let me begin by validating your concerns: You’re absolutely right; the world is a diaper fire, the relationship of our civilization to ecology is a nightmare, and our food web is extremely vulnerable. You are in the right place and for the right reasons. Hello. Welcome.
Now let me manage your expectations.
About me: I’ve been gardening for 15 years. I’ve been studying plants for 20 years. I have read a lot of books and taken a lot of expensive classes. My areas of special interest are permaculture and plant medicine. I am working my way toward Master Gardener certification. I don’t know even close to everything, but I know what I know, and I know how to find things out and discern good information from bad, and this is what I bring. I’m also middle aged, a dad, a full time perfumer, and I run a regular D&D game for my family. So please know that when I fall short, I’m doing my best.
About this newsletter: There is a lot to know, and a huge diversity of needs and conditions to cover, so I’m going to do my best to focus on addressing the specific needs of why you’re here: you want to do as much as you can with the space and resources you have, to improve life for yourself and people you care about. Because there is so much to know, I plan to publish every Friday and will stick as close to that schedule as possible. Because I’m forecasting work I have not yet done, that is subject to change. My intention is to make this information free to anyone who wants it because I believe that is important.
About what you can expect to accomplish: My main issue with the well-intentioned, if slightly panicky clarion call of GROW YOUR OWN FOOD!!!!! is that apart from being superficially good advice, it is profoundly unhelpful. What does that mean to someone who lives in an apartment? What does that mean to someone with a small backyard, or even a big one? How many people receiving that message have the resources to be full time farmers?
If you are just starting out, you are not going to replace your full caloric needs by growing your own food. Not without substantial time, space, and financial resources (at least to begin with), and certainly not by yourself.
You aren’t going to (nor should you try to) replace every prescription medication with plants you process at home. While it’s true that many medicines have natural plant origins, they are developed in expensive labs and achieve degrees of concentration, purity, and testing that we don’t have the access (or education) to do ourselves.
The thing is, they’re both worth doing because:
This Isn’t A Zero-Sum Game
My problem with GROW YOUR OWN FOOD!!!!! messaging is that it makes it sound like if you can’t just replace your entire diet with homegrown food, then you’re just screwed and fully subject to scarcity, inflation, and food web collapse. That goes double if you’re poor, and triple if you’re disabled.
You can grow food, and herbs. You can grow medicinal plants. Both of these things have value beyond a binary of either fulfilling all of your worldly needs or not:
1. Growing things is good for you. It might take a few tries to get it right the first time, but you will learn, and you will nurture a living thing into existence, and the learning and the nurturing, even if it’s just one little plant that never fruits, is worth doing.
2. You can grow and process medicinal plants that might supplement medications you already take, or preclude the need to take them. It’s rare that you can or should try to replace a prescription medication, but sometimes melatonin and an antihistamine will do where you might have reached for a sleeping pill. Maybe your mild anxiety can be helped with a fast-acting tincture and that’s enough, and if it isn’t, you can always explore medications.
3. It’s okay to grow things because they look nice, smell good, or clean your air. Plants are generally good friends to have around! Even one plant can do some lifting to improve your air quality and mental health.
Both food and medicine go much farther when you trade and share. Food cultivation and medicine were meant to be communal, shared endeavors.
Finally, you might not always be in a restrictive situation. You can start now, build your knowledge, and gain some experience that you can bring to that nice big yard one day, or to a community garden or food co-op in your area. You’ll have a useful skill and that will be something that goes with you wherever you are and whoever you’re with.
Because this newsletter, blog, and community space grew in response to bad messaging, I think it might be good to start by addressing some of the things you’ve probably seen around:
GROW YOUR OWN FOOD!!!!!!
This is usually well intentioned, but it is a message devoid of content and practically useless to nearly everyone who sees it. Most people can’t just “grow their own food” (we have to assume the author means “all of it” lacking any context), and even if someone could grow some food, where do they start? What do they need?
Chances are you probably can grow something you can eat! If you can learn how to do that with even one or two plants, you will have developed a useful skill, knowledge you can extrapolate to more plants in more space, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have some homegrown produce you can hand out. It feels good to say, “I grew this myself!” and hand someone a vegetable that puts grocery store produce to shame.
Start a garden with your neighbor!!!
Well, yes, but actually no. While this message begins to touch on the idea that food production should be communal, it is completely tone deaf to the American socio-political landscape. There’s a good chance your immediate neighbors are unreasoning goons who want you dead. You don’t owe them anything, and you shouldn’t hang your existence on their cooperative whims.
What you should do instead is find friends, neighbors, community gardens, food pantries, and food co-ops that align with your morals, learn about their needs, and try to meet as much as you can. If you believe in feeding hungry people no matter their ideology, then donating your fresh produce to a food pantry is the most direct line between your delicious goods and people who need them.
You can’t grow your own food/civilization organized around farms
This is not only goofy and transparently wrong, it’s also erasing a hundred thousand years of human history. It is true that human development has revolved around farming, but there is absolutely nothing that says untenable practices like massive, soul-destroying monocultures and nightmarish factory farming are the only ways we can do things.
You can grow food for yourself. We can grow food together. We can feed very large groups of people very efficiently using ecological best-practices with some trade-offs (mostly having to do with constant access to any given food product on the planet at any given time, which is already grotesquely unsustainable at every level).
Don’t listen to people who say things like this. Most of the time I see it happen, further down the comment thread, they’re whining that they aren’t going to do any food production, therefore factory farming is the only way anyone is going to eat. Stupid.
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You’re going to spend a million dollars just to save $2 on tomatoes
First of all, I’ve grown tomatoes out of an old boot using soil I dug out of the ground, and with seeds that came from other tomatoes. Gardening can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be.
Second, if you’re using the bottom line of tomatoes as a reason whether or not to grow anything, you’re completely missing the point.
You probably will put in, at least at first, more money (and certainly more time) than the retail value of what you’re growing is worth. Who cares?
If you want to beat the buffet on gardening, you need to start thinking in terms of replacing percentages of your grocery bill, and that isn’t a scale that most of us need to worry about right now. This person probably just guessed their way through, got suckered into buying expensive beds and soils, didn’t actually enjoy the process, and went in with garbage expectations.
Don’t let uncommitted amateurs who failed at homesteading with one tomato plant one time discourage you.
Future topics
Like I said, there’s a lot to cover, but here are some areas I intend to address early on:
Picking starter plants for your situation
Common setups for indoor plants
Tools, soils, and supplies
Gardening with disability
Food sharing and networking
Medicinal Plants for Beginners
I know many of you had questions about your immediate needs, and there is a channel on Discord where I will help with those as much as I’m able. I will also post links to various resources as they come up in their own channels. You can join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/zwMrt2My3e
If you miss something or want to revisit a post, you can find back issues here: https://strangefireandfumery.com/blogs/strange-roots
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