Steve Skojec

Just because you live in the city doesn’t mean you can’t grow your own food. It’s cheaper and tastier:

When Janell Fairman and her husband moved to Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, they didn’t have a backyard. So, Fairman secured a small plot of land in their local community garden and began growing cherry tomatoes, eggplants and more.

Gardening, Fairman said, has been a beloved hobby for years. And the 68-year-old retired archivist recognizes that growing her own produce could have economic benefits, too.

“I think we eat better for the amount of money that we spend,” she said.

As food prices continue to rise, many urbanites are beginning to share Fairman’s reasoning. From Boston to Seattle, municipal officials and community organizers are finding an increased demand for plots in community gardens as more residents look to grow their own food.

For city dwellers who don’t own outdoor space, community garden plots — which are typically owned by cities or nonprofit organizations — are their answer to suburban backyard gardens.

“You get these things, such as increasing food prices and the high cost of gas, and it really bites into a family’s budget,” said Rachel Surls, the county director for University of California Cooperative Extension, in Los Angeles County. Community gardens, she said, “are an easy way to respond to that.”

Paying to Garden

Under a common type of community garden model, users pay an annual fee for the privilege of growing plants on a plot of land within a larger garden. In Portland, Ore., the fee for a 400-square-foot plot of land is $50. But the value of food grown on that land, according to Leslie Pohl-Kosbau, the director of the Portland Parks and Recreation community gardens program, can be many times greater.

“A person, if they’re a really good gardener, can raise $500 to $1,000 worth of food on a 20-by-20-foot plot, depending on their skills and by the way they garden,” she said.

I admit I never devoted as much energy to this (read: none) when we were in our apartments/townhome. Now that we have the big back yard we have a good-sized little garden, about 10 X 20′. But these people have the right idea, and they stand only to benefit from it. I can’t help but wonder how much it would change the consumption and spending patterns of a city if a majority of people did what these people are doing.

From a reader comes this neat article in the New York Times:

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

This urban agriculture movement has grown even more vigorously elsewhere. Hundreds of farmers are at work in Detroit, Milwaukee, Oakland and other areas that, like East New York, have low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.

Local officials and nonprofit groups have been providing land, training and financial encouragement. But the impetus, in almost every case, has come from the farmers, who often till when their day jobs are done, overcoming peculiarly urban obstacles.

The Wilkses’ return to farming began in 1990 when their daughter planted a watermelon in their backyard. Before long, Mrs. Wilks, an administrator in the city’s Department of Education, was digging in the yard after work. Once their ambition outgrew their yard, she and Mr. Wilks, a city surveyor, along with other gardening neighbors, received permission to use a vacant lot across from a garment factory at the end of their block.

They cleared it of trash and tested its soil with help from GreenThumb, a Parks Department gardening program. They found traces of lead, so to ensure their food’s safety, they built raised beds of compost. (Heavy metals are common contaminants in city soil because of vehicle exhaust and remnants of old construction. Some studies have found that such ground can be cultivated as long as the pH is kept neutral.)

They wanted their crops to be organic, a commitment they shared with many other farmers in this grimy landscape. They planted some marigolds to deter squirrels; they have not had rat problems, which can plague urban gardens; and they abandoned crops, like corn, that could attract rodents. They put up fences to thwart other pests — thieves and vandals — and posted signs to let people know that this was a garden and no longer a dump.

Eric, a reader of mine whom I have had the pleasure to meet in person, sent me a great question by e-mail the other day:

So sorry to hear about your insurance troubles. What a mess. The financial pinch you described in your blog post reminded me of a question I had about fair trade, buying locally grown food, etc.

How have you and your wife decided when these concerns present a moral issue, and when it is more a matter of preference or aesthetics? If buying fair trade coffee is morally required, for example, then I do not think I may choose to buy cheaper coffee without sinning. Do you catch my drift?

These issues are always present, but the issue really comes to the fore under pressing financial circumstances. Taking for granted that it is “better” to by locally grown foods, may I shop at Wal-Mart if I have a big family? The answer lies, I think, in what we mean by “better”.

I think these are great questions. I’ve thought about them before, but only tangentially. The reality is that we live in an economy that makes doing what we ought far more difficult than doing what we can, in terms of where our goods come from.

If I could, I would buy nothing from China, purchase mostly local food, etc. I can’t, though. There’s just no way. And when it comes to things like electronics, most of what I get is from Asia. (Even American cars have parts made in Mexico, China, Japan, etc.)

Globalization has destroyed the real prospects of local economies, but that’s why I think it’s good to do what you can, where you can, because then it’s a financial incentive for those people - local farmers and CSAs, for example - who are trying to provide this service.

There’s another component to this - stewardship - that’s also been lost. In the depression era, people learned how to fix things. Planned obsolescence didn’t have quite the hold it does today. The expression, “they don’t make things like they used to” is entirely true. Some products are designed intentionally to become obsolete or break after a certain amount of time, and the corporate marketing machines behind consumer goods spend billions to get us hooked on novelty, on the best, brightest and newest things.

The question of fair trade coffee is interesting to me. Coffee farmers absolutely deserve a decent wage for their work, and many of the cheap coffees either fail in that regard, or fill in their blends with cheap Robusta beans from places like Vietnam - beans that provide caffeine but not much in the way of good taste.

For me, it’s a foregone conclusion that the only coffee I want is coffee that tastes good. That means I’m going to pay a premium for it, because cheap coffee rarely tastes like anything other than cheap coffee. I’d rather go without. The notion of Fair Trade, though, is a bit misleading. In a 2006 article in Reason Magazine on the topic, Nick Cho, proprieter of my favorite coffee shop in the universe, Murky Coffee, talks about this a bit:

Global Exchange, an international human rights organization and Fair Trade retailer, has adopted this stance in its marketing and politicking. In 2002 it pushed Measure O, a Berkeley ballot initiative that would have legally required that all brewed coffee in the city be certified as Fair Trade, organic, and shade-grown. In defense of the measure, the group’s Web site declares, “Almost all coffee that isn’t Fair-Trade, shade-grown, or organic exploits workers and our environment.”

That assumption, absorbed by at least some of the coffee-drinking public, drives roasters and retailers nuts. They say the idea that coffee without the Fair Trade label is based on coercion penalizes independent farmers who don’t conform to the Fair Trade vision. (They also say consumers who drink only Fair Trade coffee are missing out on some of the best roasts available.) Nick Cho, owner of Murky Coffee in Arlington, Virginia, says customers often ask whether his coffee is Fair Trade, but quality-conscious coffee shops like his would never deal in coffee bought for less than $1.26 a pound. He finds the very suggestion that he’s dealing in cheap beans grating. “You don’t walk into a four-star restaurant and demand to know whether they pay their chefs minimum wage,” says Cho.

Specialty coffee roasters have always paid above-average prices, but that hasn’t stopped activists from launching smear campaigns against high-end retailers who resist the Fair Trade model.

In the end, I think the issue is trying to do whatever small part we can to encourage sustainability in local economies and pay fair prices for whatever we can, even if it’s a bit more than at a big box store that gets its shipments straight from sweatshops in Guangdong. The moral impetus falls somewhere below things like whether or not we can give our kids the Chicken Pox vaccine (the Church says we can, with reservations) which has no other variant than the one derived from fetal cell lines. After all, one of the sins that cries out to heaven for vengeance is injustice to the wage-earner.

I’d invite anyone who’d like to chime in on this to do so in the comments. It’s a great topic for discussion.

The MP3 file of my interview with Sacred Heart Radio that I posted earlier this week was a bit large, so I’ve dumped it into a streaming video and uploaded it to Google Video (it was too long for YouTube) if you’d like to hear it:

Considering that this was my first such interview, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I just finished a radio interview with Matt Swain, producer of the Son Rise in the Morning Show on Sacred Heart Radio, 730 AM, Cincinnati. This is my first time being interviewed for radio, so hopefully I won’t sound like a bumbling dolt.

The topic is Catholic Agrarianism, and I think the show is going to run tomorrow. I’ll post a link or more audio once I get it.

Out of Iowa today comes a story about truckers, some of whom are planning to go on strike on April 1st. What they intend to accomplish by the strike is unclear. They appear to stand more to lose than to gain. But as one trucker put it, “In no way, shape or form do truckers want to hurt this country. My whole deal on this thing is that I’m shutting down on April 1. Call it a strike, a shutdown or just flat-ass going broke.”

If you don’t know why they’re striking, the answer is simple: rising fuel costs and insurance premiums are causing them to lose money on every load. Diesel has, according to this story, climbed above $4 a gallon in 17 states. A truck that does long haul runs can have tanks that reach capacities of up to 200 gallons of fuel. Imagine that - one fillup costs around 800 dollars, and by at least one account I’ve heard, that lasts for only a day-and-a-half.

Many truck drivers are owner-operators. Their rigs are their bread and butter, but making a profit with them has never been an easy living. With these additional costs, many are going out of business entirely. Some are taking out mortgages on their homes in order to subsidize their costs - and this in a market where equity is leaking like a sieve.

If the truckers have to stop, what happens to you? Think about it - just about everything you eat, wear, or use is shipped across the country, if not the world. I live in Virginia. I ate some strawberries this morning on my cereal that came from Florida. The tea in my desk drawer came from China, as did my shoes, and my phone is from Taiwan. The magazine that I have in my inbox was published in Detroit. My pen comes from Japan. My notepad, Brazil. My tissues, New York.

You know this already, but I wanted to paint the picture. Very little of what we consume and use and take for granted on a daily basis gets to us without truckers. This is yet another reason why at my house, we’re stocking up on food a little bit. Why we’re looking forward to the return of the farmer’s market in a couple weeks. Why we’re growing a garden, baking our own bread, trying to find local suppliers of meat and dairy and flour. This summer, we’ll be learning how to make cheese and beer at home.

Local economies need to be re-established, I think, or things or going to get really tough. The bright side of this is that jobs can be created out of necessity, not government programs, farmers can make a living, small businesses can flourish, and the price of oil can affect us all just a little bit less. We’ll never do away with our globalized economy, but we’re entirely too addicted to it. It’s time to be proactive about having a backup plan.

The truckers are the canary in a big, scary commerce coal mine.

The New York Times recently ran a story about the growing number of young men and women who are choosing to return to the land to eke out a living, growing organic produce and livestock or making artisinal cheese:

Last week, Mr. Shute could be found here, elbow-deep in wet compost two hours north of New York City, filling greenhouse trays for onion seeds. Along with a partner, Miriam Latzer, he runs Hearty Roots, a 25-acre organic farm.

“I never thought I wanted to farm,” Mr. Shute said. “But it feels like an honest living.”

His partner, Ms. Latzer (the two are not a couple) is 33 and a former urban planner. Her parents, a professor and a librarian, “think its crazy that I’m a farmer,” she said. “They wonder what planet I came from.”

This one. Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E. coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.

“Young farmers are an emerging social movement,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 26, who is making a documentary called “The Greenhorns” about the trend.

This is tremendously appealing to me. I even find that some of my reasons - dislike of corporate farming, desire to reduce petroleum costs/usage, desire to build local sustainability and economy rather than global - are beginning to coincide with my more liberal counterparts in this latest back-to-the-land renaissance.

Our new house has more land than the last one, and we’re about to get a garden started once we get final approval from the landlord.

It’s not a farm, but it’s a start.