When I lived on a standard city lot in Minneapolis, I was growing corn (lost most of it to squirrels), tomatoes, carrots, horseradish (can't kill that stuff), squash and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. And a "natural prairie" section of mostly native grasses and wildflowers.
Just depends on how much land you have and how much of your lawn you want to dig up :-)
> What about the vast majority of people who live in the suburbs or cities?
Suburban houses usually have a garden around them, you can grow vegetables and stuff in/on top of those. Plant some fruit trees/bushes as well and you have a start :)
Cities are more difficult, unless you have access to a balcony/patio/roof. I know in some local neighborhoods, neighbors have gotten together to create little co-cops, and took over small unused plots and grow some stuff together there. Plots like these for example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Carrer+del+Doctor+Trueta,+...
Sure, none of these will make you 100% independent when it comes to what you eat, but small differences can add up and also spread the knowledge/ambition for more people to do it.
It's not either/or. I also strongly support major changes to agricultural and food policy.
For what it's worth, my property is suburban. It's a post-war subdivision with rather large lots, we just choose to use most of ours productively. Food and timber for us, native plants for the critters, grass be damned. When we commuted, we lived in a denser area with better transit access, but neither my wife nor I have had a commute since before the pandemic.
> I also strongly support major changes to agricultural and food policy
Florida and Illinois, on complete opposite ends of the political spectrum, are the only two states with laws the explicitly prohibit towns and cities from preventing you from using your yard (front, back, side, whatever) as a vegetable garden. They allow for regulations about how big and where your greenhouses/hothouses could be, how much water you use, etc. But nothing that can defacto prohibit you from using your whole yard productively.
This is something that should be nationwide. In most places, growing crops in your front yard is either sort-of-tolerated-until-you-make-someone-mad or not at all allowed.
1) I'm sitting on a quarter acre in the suburbs and we're slowly eliminating the lawn in favor of more food garden every year
2) Sure, but growing food is something I can do using only myself and the materials to hand without having to wait for the crippled and backward process of creating new regulations to sort itself out, growing food now helps mitigate the problem now while we push for new regulations and growing food does nothing to get in the way of new regulations and if the push for new regulations fails I still have a garden
Sprouting is an excellent and compact way to get some fresh greens into your diet in a small space. No urine required (although I too do dump my urine on my farm hosts' compost). I live in a short school bus with less than 8sqm of space and do my sprouting in a small clear plastic tote. Every day I eat fresh sprouts, usually with something like wild-caught canned mackerel.
Too late, they already ran a DNA analysis on it and partnered with 23andMe, and because your cousin took a DNA ancestry test after receiving a kit as a present
four years ago, corporate now knows it was you.
