I have two rainbarrels. I have a compost bin. I take full advantage of Austin’s new bulk recycling services. I’m going to be growing herbs, and I have seeds germinating for a vegetable garden. At this rate it won’t be long before I’m half-baked, listening to the Grateful Dead and Phish, and eating an earth shoe while twisting my hair and beard into matted dreadlocks.
Seriously, I never thought I’d be this into this sort of thing. For years I’ve wanted to grow an herb garden, but never got the momentum up to do it. Enter Sweets, who comes from a society and culture, and specifically a family that have maintained a garden and have been growing part of their own groceries for many generations. Almost every home has a garden space, and yards — even tiny ones — are commonly converted into vegetable gardens. It’s a sensibility and value that’s passed down through the generations.
The big push for this sort of thing came during World War II, when England was not only diverting all its resources toward the war effort, but also reducing its dependency on outside supplies as supply vessels can easily be (and frequently were) sunk by enemy craft. We here in the States, while being severely limited by rationing, were never crippled by the imminent threat to our very borders. Growing vegetable gardens did become a means to supplement our personal food supply, but it wasn’t strictly a necessity — tightening a belt isn’t the same as not being able to get supplies at all. Come the end of the war, we weren’t picking up the pieces after the Blitz and trying to get our country in order, and the need to grow food rapidly dwindled as the US got back up to speed and entered a new era of prosperity.
Even as the need diminished in the UK, the desire remained. That sense of accomplishment and self reliance became a part of the DNA of the country as a whole, and gardening is a skill taught from parents and grandparents to children.
Nowadays, there is a renewed movement in the US starting to growing edibles again, and it’s in a small way influenced by a shrinking economy, but mostly it’s the sensibilities of the modern hippies/new-agers/tree-huggers/etc. A new generation of folks are more environmentally conscious, and they’re making that thoughtfulness into a viable industry – the happy balance between good intentions and profitability, and that’s how you get the most people on board. Recycling is gaining momentum in a lot of municipalities, folks are repurposing a lot of second-hand items and junk these days and there is a big, big push to take care of one’s own piece of the environment, and that includes growing a garden.
Sweets, interested in starting with an herb garden, suggested that we do so, and it snowballed into moving forward on a small vegetable garden. We’re going to be growing the herbs in pots, in order to make them movable and reconfigurable. We have a good spot for the garden proper, but we’re going to start small this year and expand as necessary in the seasons to come. We’re looking at spring and fall plantings, and Austin climate being what it is, we ought to be able to keep fresh veggies of one sort or another in the house for the better part of the year.
Frankly, once the initial setup is done, there is minimal expense involved in maintaining and carrying on from year to year. You can put as little or as much into as you please — from simple planters on an apartment patio, to serious composting and rain harvesting — or you can take the middle ground like we have. The City of Austin has an excellent water conservation plan (can you say “drought zone”?), and they are offering rainbarrels at a serious discount. You place them under your gutter downspouts, and use the collected water for your garden and other non-potable uses (and both of ours filled up after one evening of rain). Simple and easy, it saves a bit on our water bill, and it means I’m not using treated water for my garden. We also bought a small compost bin that will let us use yard trimmings, fall leaves and certain kitchen waste to fertilize our garden as well, reducing the expense of fancy fertilizes, and saving our water table from the same. Frankly, I’m two parts stingy to one part environmentally conscious… you find your motivation where you can.
In the past recycling was never anything I was very vigilant about. If it was convenient, I did it, if it wasn’t… well, I have never argued that I wasn’t lazy. In NOLA, we did aluminum cans, and that was about it. I wasn’t sorting my recyclables, and I didn’t much feel like having to determine what could and couldn’t go in the bin from a very selective list. Austin started out that way, but about three months back they replaced all the tiny curbside bins with gigantic 90 gallon wheeled cans, and they pretty much take anything, and there is no sorting involved. That caters to even lazy old me… make it easy, and more people will get on board.
The bottom line is this: gardening is frankly a bit of fun, even at this early stage in the game. It’s fascinating to take the seeds and watch them sprout — it’s like a magic trick. The work involved leads to a tremendous sense of satisfaction, and you want to shout “Look what I did! Me! The guy who killed a Chiapet in elementary school!” And then at the end of it all, you have tasty things to enjoy.
Now excuse me, I have a shirt to go tie-dye.
