Hobby farming
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First off, greetings to ja[1] and oms[2], relative newcomers to the
phlogosphere. I feel like there has been a small surge in new gopher holes on
SDF lately, which is great!
Recently tfurrows wrote a nice long post[3] about, among other things, his
desire to attempt some kind of modern subsistence farming. Responding to that
will probably the main focus of this post, but I wanted to touch on something
else first. Part of tfurrows' post was an expression of frustration at how
various government impositions make it impossible or impractical to farm on land
that you allegedly own. This echos sentiment he expressed in a yet earlier
post[4] about how his desire to live in a yurt is frustrated by things like
building codes, sanitation codes etc. in some US states basically ruling out the
possibility of living in the structure of your choice. I completely get this
frustration. Sometimes I think one of the greatest injustices modern society
imposes upon those living within it is the near total lack of options for
voluntarily and gracefully exiting it, even partially or temporarily. Living
in a boat seems to be one of the very few lifestyels which are
unusual-but-usual-enough that it is catered to by society at large, to some
extent. I have never looked into the details closely, but casual reading of
stuff online seems to suggest that if you own a boat you can do your own wiring
and plumbing on that boat, even if you live on it, without having to worry an
awful lot about qualifications or code compliance. If you stuff something up
and make your life unpleasant, that's your problem. It's odd that this kind of
life is quite okay at sea but not at all on land.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about the idea of modern day individual farming.
Not farming on a massive scale with the sole purpose of selling off everything
you grow to get money to buy food to eat, and not the old-fashioned image of a
peasant working their hands to the bone to grow just enough food to scrape by
without starving, but something in between where you farm just to provide your
own immediate food requirements, or perhaps a little in excess of that so you
can trade with other people in your community. I have read, and certainly it
seems plausible, that with today's much improved understanding of agricultural
science and the availability of better tools, this does not have to be a life of
unrelenting physical labour and inadequate nutrition, but can be vaguely
comfortable.
This possibility is of course of great interest to me, given my general interest
in a dramatically "down shifted" lifestyle. Back in New Zealand I experimented
very casually with growing vegetables in my back yard, and had some successes,
but also some failures. I never quite put the time or effort into it that is
realistically required to have much hope at success.
I would like to try harder, but, well, Finland, even in the South, is not
exactly Phoenix, Arizona. Gardening seems pretty much out of the question for a
good chunk of the year, although maybe this is pessimistic. Driving around
Iceland a few years ago,, I remember being amazed at how many greenhouses there
were scattered around the place, and I seem to remember being told that the
country provided a lot (all?) of its own vegetables. Then again, electricity is
dirt cheap there, which possibly helps with that kind of operation. Anyway,
I'm also not in a situation where I can build a greenhouse in my backyard. But
not far away from my home at all there is a patch of land alongside a river
where, in the summer months, you can rent a small bit of garden space for very
reasonable prices, and my wife and I are pretty keen to give this a try this
year. I'll try to take it a bit more seriously this time, both in terms of how
much actual work I put into watering, weeding, pest control etc. on a daily
basis, and in terms of actually learning about what I should plant and how in
order to maximise yield.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/ja/
[2]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/oms/
[3]
gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2018/MAR2018/alz_jobSatisfaction.txt
[4]
gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2018/FEB2018/aml_yurtItUp.txt
