July 18th, 2009
We’re in the middle of a deck overhaul at our apartment. We currently have a ~450 square foot deck with a lot of built in furniture and plantboxes which we just finished tearing out due to extensive dry rot. The new replacements boxes are being installed and this has coincided beautifully with my new passion to plant. I talked with my landlord today and he’s agreed that, a few major plant sites aside, we are free to use the plant boxes for anything we like. So I have the run of several spacious planter boxes – well, spacious for a city apartment anyway. I’m so excited!
As you know, I never do anything without first reading a book on it. Yesterday I picked up this book: Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The square inch gardener’s guide to year round growing, fermenting and sprouting. It’s intended for people in cities who live in apartments, and though I don’t know about the fermenting bit (sounds icky), the rest sounds perfect.
It’s late in the year for planting anything other than lettuces, radishes, and overwinter plants (I have no idea what that means yet) but I’m not letting that stop me. Lettuces we shall have! And maybe I can rustle up some mature plants to introduce to my patch now – I was thinking herbs might be good for this. Do vegetable plants survive transplanting when they are in the middle of, er, producing? Can you even buy such a thing?
It’s going to be a blast learning about how to make a garden. And I am feeling very lucky that I live on the sunny side of the building with a big deck with landlord financed planter boxes. Whee!
JBrydle asked what brought this all on. Really it’s been a five year or so process, though the tipping point was watching the movie Food Inc. earlier this week. When I lived in Halifax I got interested in the food industry and started reading books, particularly those by Marion Nestle, about how the food industry works. I won’t reproduce her arguments here, but basically the idea is that “big food” acts to prevent regulatory oversight that is necessary for disease and death prevention, while unduly influencing consumers away from healthful choices. Other books I was influenced by were Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and more recently Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved. So I already had some notion of the evils of mass food production as it is currently practiced, yet I never made a move away from that industry. It wasn’t something I dwelled much on – I never became interested in trying to source local food or avoiding highly processed stuff. I shopped exclusively at Safeway. It was just easier I suppose.
And then I watched Food Inc. As I wrote about earlier, it was hard to watch the animal scenes, and in the midst of feeling grief and anger at the thoughtless treatment of feeling creatures… the rest of the movie happened, and I realized my outrage at factory animal “processing” is no different than outrage and grief at the abuse of impoverished workers, manipulation and exploitation of farmers at the hands of major buying cartels, and environmental devastation as a result of intensive farming practices. If I could make a change with veganism, why not with those other things? Most of that movie was not new information to me, but somehow I had never felt as deeply moved by those issues before.
Become a vegetarian was a huge change in my life and I think it’s made me more comfortable with change, and has also given me a sense of agency and power in the world that I didn’t have before. I used to eat the way my parents and fellow white Canadians eat, mindlessly. Then one day I realized I needed to opt out of a system I saw as inexcusably cruel – and while some people say my refusal to eat meat changes nothing, I don’t see it that way. Not only is there about four hundred pounds of meat no longer being demanded in the market, and a voice spreading the message of compassion and health – but there was a big change inside me. For the first time I realized I didn’t have to just do what everyone else does simply because it’s what everyone else does. I can be an active moral agent and make choices, even unpopular ones, that I come to on my own, through my own process of inquiry and self exploration. I don’t really know how to explain how empowering that has been for me.
And now that I know I can do things like that, I am much more ready to make further “radical” changes for similar reasons. I don’t want my food to come to me after thousands of miles of fossil fuel burning transport. I don’t want to have cheap fruit that requires abused immigrant workers to harvest. I don’t want to encourage Monsanto to make more pesticides that require farmers to use only Monsanto patented seeds (illegal to save season to season) to survive them. Whereas I do want to encourage small scale farming outfits that retain diversity in the crops. I want to grow my own produce that supplements my groceries so I spend less, and connect to the earth more.
So, while I know nothing about gardening or living more sustainably, I am excited to learn how and start making changes. I’ll never be perfect, but I could do much better than I currently do. It feels right to me.