This redbud was in full bloom a week ago
Awhile back I made my first social media post in several
years, to the effect that Mike and I were doing fine in the midst of the
COVID-19 pandemic. A friend of mine responded that he was imagining Mike and I
living off our garden indefinitely. To be sure, our vegetable and small fruit
garden is larger than most backyard gardens, but like most people, including me
before I started gardening, my friend isn’t fully aware of how much he eats in
a year and how much land it takes to produce that amount of food. In a later
post I plan to dig more deeply into this topic, based on the 25 plus years of
experience I have in growing backyard gardens. In the meantime, I’d like to
take a look at the upsurge in gardening that the loss of jobs and social
distancing measures associated with COVID-19 has engendered and why I think
that it illustrates the biggest benefit of growing backyard gardens.
In the US the COVID-19 isolation measures came during March
for most of the population, near the beginning of the growing season or not
long before it begins for those of us east of the Rockies. Most US garden seed
retailers experience their heaviest seed sales during late winter and early
spring, after gardeners have received seed catalogs and decided what to grow
and how much seed they will need for their gardens. After many people lost
their jobs or began to work at home in response to the various measures enacted
to reduce the transmission rate of COVID-19, some of them realized that they
had the time to begin a garden and to cook and a need to reduce their grocery
expenditures. They promptly began ordering seeds and garden supplies, as did
the habitual gardeners who usually order seeds at this time of year. The
increased business combined with the need to implement social distancing
measures in the buildings in which the seed orders are pulled and prepared for
shipping has resulted in delays in processing and sending seed orders. A number
of seed retailers have been forced to stop accepting new orders for a period of
time while they caught up on pulling and mailing orders they had already
received. While this makes things more difficult for erstwhile gardeners who
must wait for their seed orders to arrive, I am grateful that my favorite seed
retailers will be among the businesses that do well despite the economic
disruptions caused by the isolation measures.
Recently some US meat processing plants have been forced to
close because of the rapid spread of COVID-19 among the workers in the plants. As
a result there has been some discussion of COVID-19 effects on future food
supplies in the media. This ties in with the increase in gardening in an
interesting way, which I will highlight in this post.
John Jeavons, in his How to Grow More Vegetables
book, states that many people grow backyard gardens for what he calls nutrition intervention.
In other words, they grow in their gardens mostly vegetables eaten fresh or minimally cooked. However, he feels that more people should focus their backyard
gardening efforts on sources of calories (grains, dry beans, and potatoes
primarily). If there were a shortage of grains, dry beans, or potatoes
in the US his position would have merit. However, to my mind he fails to
take into account the effect of automation on the production of these crops, compared to the needs for fruit and vegetable crops to be harvested, and
sometimes planted and tended as well, primarily by human labor.
Anyone who lives in the Midwest, as I do, has seen the
effect of cheap oil and mechanization on farmland. It is especially noticeable
during harvest season, when huge machinery operated by one person drives slowly
through the field, ingesting entire corn plants on one end and spitting out
clean corn seed on the other. Whatever you may think about eating oil (which is
essentially what we are doing in the large-scale agriculture of the US
Midwest), social distancing is built into it. These farms don’t need seasonal
farmhands to produce a crop. Moreover, the farmers planned their farms and
ordered their seeds before COVID-19 caused its havoc. That corn, wheat, rice,
and soybean seed, and those seed potatoes and dry bean seed, have been or will
be planted. If the livestock that would normally eat Midwestern-grown corn and
soybeans is significantly reduced in number due to knock-on effects from
COVID-19, humans can eat corn and soybeans too. We may not like it as much as
meat (as an omnivore myself, I do not look forward to less meat availability
and higher prices), but if that is what there is, we’ll eat it. If you aren’t
already eating a substantial amount of these crops, you may want to spend the next
few months finding cookbooks on how to make good use of them and starting to
experiment with the recipes.
What about vegetables and fruits? While planting and tending
of some of these have been automated to a greater or lesser degree, harvest is
often still a labor-intensive activity requiring human minds and bodies to
accomplish. It is these human minds and bodies that could be in short supply at
crucial points in the growing season. I have already read reports that
vegetable crops in Florida had to be plowed under because the social isolation
measures meant there were not enough workers to harvest the crop, and the
institutions that the vegetables were meant for had closed so that even if the
crops could be harvested, there were no buyers for them.
At the same time, it is exactly these crops – lettuce and
other salad greens and roots; tomatoes and peppers; green beans and sweet corn;
zucchini and cucumbers; root vegetables like carrots and onions – that are
easiest to grow well in a small backyard garden. Fruits like strawberries and
raspberries, if protected from birds and other predators, are also labor
intensive, vitamin-rich, and delicious crops that work well in a backyard garden setting.
If these were all the crops that I grew, my garden could be about half the size
it is now, meaning it would need half the labor that it currently does. And
these are exactly the seeds and plants that folks thrown into their backyards
are seeking to grow, and exactly the crops that are most likely to be in short
supply if social distancing and closed borders reduce the workforce of the
large vegetable-growing farms in Florida, California, and other places where
this kind of farming is prevalent in the landscape. Thus I take it as a good
sign that so many people are taking up backyard vegetable and fruit growing
this spring. We need more backyard and small scale vegetable and fruit growing
to provide the vitamins and minerals (and the tastes) that are missing in the
large-scale grain, dry bean, and potato crops. Combine the calories available
from the latter with the nutrition and taste of the former, and that will make
for better health and a more resilient food system overall. If my blog helps
you to grow a better backyard garden, I will have accomplished one of my goals
in writing it.
I hope to have the next post up sometime in May, but May is
also the busiest garden month of the year. Sometime in the next couple of
months I expect to return to the topic I brought up in the first paragraph.
Until then, I wish all of you good health and happiness!
