Our Food Industry is Broken, and Growing Your Own Veg is Simpler Than You Think
Conversations with a beginner gardener, part 1. What’s it really like to grow your own food as a newbie? 🌽
The modern Western world’s approach to food production is problematic, to say the least. Our food industry has evolved into a system fraught with issues.
To start with, over a third of food produced in the world for humans every year is wasted. And food packaging was the second most common item retrieved during annual beach clean-ups by the Ocean Conservancy in 2018. Then there are the transportation costs for both the end-consumer and the planet.
We can’t carry on with the ways we consume currently.
But there are opportunities for change on an individual level. Some Americans have started to grow their own fresh vegetables. They either supplement or completely replace the food they would otherwise buy in stores. Growing your own food requires dedication, but the results can be incredibly satisfying.
Just some of the reasons people decide to start growing veggies are:
- 🌱 No GMOs or pesticides
- 🌱 Less or no plastic usage
- 🌱 Very low transportation costs
- 🌱 The freshness (straight from garden to table within minutes!)
- 🌱 The TASTE
I met up with Steven, a newbie gardener, to talk about the challenges and surprises of his first few months of growing his own food.
The Interviewee
Steven is in his mid-20s, lives in Massachusetts and works shifts as an EMT. He climbs in his spare time and plays many instruments. He has barely any previous experience but growing vegetables has become Steven’s new ‘thing’. Supplementing what he buys in stores appeals to his interest in both lowering his overall cost of living and reducing his carbon footprint.
Last October, I spent time with Steven to find out exactly what it’s like making the leap and growing your own food.
The Interview
Steven and I talk in the car whilst he drives. We’re travelling to his mum’s house, to see how his new garden is doing. He tells me that he’d prefer to talk in the car. He worries that if I try to pin him down for a face-to-face, he’d get distracted or fidgety after 10 minutes.
We sit in his Mini and coast through a few of the small, homely towns which characterise the Massachusetts that exists beyond Boston. The wind is blustery but the air is surprisingly humid. I struggle to balance my laptop on my knees but as a payoff, Steven is fully engaged in our conversation.
Caroline: What made you want to start your own garden?
Steven: I mean, I’ve always wanted to do a garden but I just had the perfect moment with my mum having a new place with a lot of land, and a family member moving out. It facilitated planting a garden because my mum needed food. And now I’ve started, I just see everything else that could be done.
When did you plant your first vegetable?
My mum started a garden when I was little, and I would help her with it when I was five. I remember in high school, I was maybe 17 and I started a garden inside; I put them in a little box and I put tin foil on top so I could shine a light in, and it would reflect down on them. I started sunflowers, strawberries, cucumbers… that’s all I can remember. But I never put them outside so they just died.
Wait, my mum started cucumbers too, when I was 15 or 16, and she would bring them in for, like, a salad. But I didn’t like vegetables then, so I didn’t really eat them.
This year is the first year, and we started really late in August.
If I had known more about it before, I would’ve started it earlier, but I had other things I was doing. Although it was actually perfect for the fall harvest, because any later and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything.
What do you have growing right now?
Um… onions (they’re very small), carrots (they’re very small too), cucumbers, zucchini, radishes (we’re on our second crop of those now, as we’ve already harvested one), kale, beets, lettuce, spinach and eggplants, although I don’t know why I did those, I guess it was just for sh*ts and giggles… because they’re tiny and they’re never gonna get anywhere…
Why’s that?
They’re warm weather; they grow like tomatoes. You need them really hot, like in the middle of summer.
And actually we started a bunch of herbs inside, we’ve started sage, basil, parsley, cilantro and thyme. And my mum already has a big rosemary plant going.
How much land would you say you need to start a good-sized garden?
You could start it on anything; on whatever size you’ve got.
It could be a raised garden that’s three feet by six feet, or you could do your entire backyard if you wanted… As long as you have the sun throughout, I suppose.
Some people do little pots or hanging baskets.
People run indoor hydroponic systems, which I’m going to look at over the winter, and see if I can set that up. And that can take up no room at all if you do it right.
What has been your biggest challenge so far?
I’d say planning, although that wasn’t very hard at the beginning. I guess in the future it’s going to be unforeseen stuff, like with the beets we just harvested that are all green and no beet. But when I looked it up, it said that too much nitrogen and not enough phosphorus will cause the beet not to grow big, so I guess next year I’ll go, “okay, I need to change that and have more phosphorus in the soil”.
Other than that, I guess it’s just the physical aspect of digging up all the grass and the entire area. Getting all of the goddamn rocks out of the soil, because there are so many rocks. Also, obviously just expanding the garden. Because right now I believe it’s 12ft x 25ft? Next year it’s gonna be 4m x 40m. So it’s gonna be f*cking way bigger.
Has anything not gone quite to plan, and what did you learn from it?
Honestly, everything is going far too smoothly. I suppose the fact that the beets didn’t work shows that there’s stuff to come. I’m sure I’ll pull up those carrots and they’ll be tiny baby carrots. I’m still happy because I harvested radishes and kale, and they’re both f*cking delicious.
When I get into the more complicated plants, I’m sure there’ll be some stuff. I plan on just diving headfirst and seeing what happens.
Have you noticed variations in the same plants produced between different seeds?
I have, but only in the kale and beets. The beets, out of the same packet, 80 percent of them are red, as a beet should be in my mind. And then some of them are yellow. They have completely green tops and yellow bottoms. I don’t know if it’s the seed dealer or what, but I don’t mind, it’s still delicious.
The kale was the craziest, there are like 5 different variations in there. Some of them are big leaves, all green; some of them just have a green stem and veins; some are all purple stem and veins; some of them are really curvy; one of them is super flat. And they all came out of the same packet. But again, I don’t care, it’s just for me so they don’t need to be perfect.
Where do you get your information and guidance on growing your own food from?
Just different places on the internet. I’ve always followed things about living differently.
I took a horticulture class in high school, but I didn’t take a whole lot from that — just to be gentle when replanting, and that plants need nitrogen and phosphorus, and there was another lesson too…
A lot of it is looking up random info on the internet as it pops into my brain. I’d also like to say it’s common sense; people should just kind of know how plants work. You plant them in the ground, you water them, you look after them…
You can get more complicated than that and you should, but I feel like then that’s the hardest bit.
I learnt about doing furrows just from seeing gardens like that and history class, where we studied ancient agricultural techniques for drainage. So yeah, I just set up my garden.
How difficult is it to start a garden?
It’s not difficult at all. The most difficult thing is getting yourself to do the work if you don’t want to. Once you’re in it and you see stuff growing, you just want to keep going.
I guess it’s physically demanding — in tilling the earth, putting the fence around it, raking and getting the furrows right, weeding… But it’s not nearly the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
How much work does your garden take to maintain?
A few hours a week. You could probably get it down to six hours a week, once it’s up and going. You just need maybe 20, 30 minutes of watering, and an hour or two of weeding. If you do a really good weed, they come back less and less. It’s almost like they give up, and then it’s really easy. I weeded that garden like crazy maybe a month ago, then last week weeded it a little bit, and now I’m not really seeing anything pop up, so.
Which veg have you grown which tastes the best?
I’d say the kale. Yeah, it tastes crazy. It tastes so much more ‘kale-y’; it just has such a deep flavour to it. If someone doesn’t like kale, have them eat freshly-picked backyard kale. The radishes were awesome too; the greens on them were so good.
I’m assuming everything is going to taste better [than shop-bought] because even the lettuce tasted better.
How does it feel to eat food that you’ve grown yourself?
Amazing. It’s free food, you go out there and you pick it, you feel so connected to it. You don’t want to see it go to waste. It makes me sad to think of that, so I’m only picking what I’m going to eat. It also means I’m eating more greens because I just can’t see it go to waste — I’d be too upset.
You feel healthier too… I don’t know, obviously that’s a placebo, although it probably is healthier. You just feel better, like damn, I’m eating some good sh*t.
Which months of the year do you plan to grow veg in?
In Massachusetts, this is a Zone 6A, so I believe our last frost is early May. So I’m going to start seeds indoors in the winter. I’m thinking of trying artichoke and leek. I’ve heard you start them in January, or even late December. And then I’ll probably do onions starting in February, then other stuff I’ll start indoors in March or April, and more afterwards outdoors.
I also want to do greenhouse tarp things over the furrows, bend metal poles over the mounds, then put plastic over those. So I could put them out maybe early April and they’d still be protected from frost, to try and extend the growing season.
You mentioned indoor hydroponic gardening. What else is in the pipeline besides the veggie garden?
The hydroponic gardening is just sort of an idea. I always thought it’d be kind of fun, but it might be a pain in the a*s. I might try lettuce and strawberry over the winter, I’ve heard they’re popular at the moment.
So I just bought oyster mushrooms, portobello spores and shiitake plugs. My mum chopped down a tree out back, I think it’s hardwood, so I’ll wait a few weeks and drill some holes in it, plant the mushrooms, see how that does.
I don’t know how they’ll do over the winter, I guess that’ll just be an experiment. Because they’ll be outside, you know. But I won’t know until I try. I’ll probably do the portobellos in the basement in the winter. I just want to become a mushroom farmer because I’m a massive hipster, I guess. I want to sell them at farmer’s markets.
What are your plans for the garden in the more distant future?
I think it’d be really cool to be self-sustaining. I’ve always thought it would be great to have a place where you don’t have to go out and buy things.
It’ll be a ton of work, and I’ll have to make sacrifices, like going without bread every week. If I get chickens, I’ll have eggs, and then I guess I’ll just be eating whole foods too. It’s definitely possible, people did it forever. A year would be a cool milestone, to be like “wow, I did this for a year”. It’d be crazy.
Potatoes — I’d grow a ton of them — and carrots. I’d look into growing chickpeas too.
I guess the challenge would be that a lot of things I eat that have high protein and high calories would be a b*tch to process. Like lentils, they come in little pods, so a bag of lentils — how many pods would you have to go through? And to make bread I’d have to dry the flour, mill it…
But I think it’d be fun. And I think it would give me a deep appreciation of what people have been doing forever. And of what somehow, nowadays, we’ve stepped away from. Most people won’t even think of growing their own stuff, and yet that’s what most people did for thousands of years. If it didn’t grow, you didn’t eat.
After The Interview
We walk into Steven’s garden and I feel a weighty pressure. Christ, do not accidentally step on any plants.
I’m impressed with the results he has achieved. He has learnt mostly on his own and spent only a few months growing his own food.
Steven shows me the tiny beets that never grew, and we cut various leaves together. He’s going to wash them and split the takings with his mum.
Steven agrees to be interviewed again in a few months. This way, I’ll be able to find out what he learns and achieves after today.
I walk away feeling inspired by Steven’s efforts. I started to wonder — what would my ideal garden look like? What would I try to grow first? And how would I feel eating food that I’d grown all by myself?
The Future
Growing your own food takes physical labour and access to appropriate land. Not everyone can. But what Steven does is also not groundbreaking.
Imagine if more of us grew our own supplies, or bought fresh vegetables straight from a neighbour’s garden. Consider the impact this could have on a broken food industry.
There has also been an increase in the number of apps that promote food waste reduction. With Olio, you can post any food you don’t want for other nearby users to pick up:
Small changes add up to big ones. With a little planning and time spent, what differences could you make for your family, community and the planet?
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Originally published at https://carolineisawriter.com.
