Maybe it's the effect of spring, but people seem to have gardens on the brain lately, from reviving indigenous vegetable gardens to planting forests for food. Today's Guest writer Jeff McIntire-Strasburg brings another garden story. Jeff is the author and publisher of sustainablog.
Can good gardens make good neighbors? Penn State human ecologist Christopher Uhl thinks so, and hes testing the idea out this Spring. Uhl will be planting a vegetable garden, but not in his own yard; rather, hell grow his crops in the yard of his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Felice, and will share the harvest with her. In this simple arrangement, Uhl sees a model for food production that both addresses some of the most unsustainable elements of our current system, and builds community around one of the most basic human activities: feeding ourselves. He notes:
Here in central Pennsylvania, we have a lot of land in our front yards, backyards, church grounds, school grounds, business parks that could be used for the growing of food.
At present, we spend a good bit of time and money maintaining our largely sterile lawnscapes. Many of us even hire gardeners to care for our grounds. As an alternative, why not allow a young person, anxious to get a start in agriculture but without the means to buy land, to start a neighborhood "farm" by knitting together land parcels in your neighborhood, thereby creating a patchwork farm. Those of you in the suburbs, with half acre and acre lots, could be heroes as you transform your subdivisions into diverse, productive patchwork farms.
Think of the advantages: You'd get fresh veggies, make deeper connections with your neighbors, give your kids the chance to live in the midst of something real and vital, and have the satisfaction of knowing that the surplus food from your land was going to be offered to others through local and regional farmers' markets.
At the turn of the 20th century, the idea of neighbors sharing in a harvest was still relatively normal; early in the 21st, its foreign to most of us in the developed world. CSAs and farmers market do much towards eliminating some of the most ecologically damaging elements of modern agriculture. Uhls concept of patchwork farms provides a framework for not only healing the Earth, but also our fractured neighborhoods and communities.
