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Can you garden your way out of poverty?

I saw a post on Twitter a little while ago, and it’s been bothering me ever since. I scrolled past, so I can’t exactly remember it. But the gist was that the writer was upset about some mainstream media advice they’d seen, that people struggling to make ends meet should start a garden.

There was a whole thread about the economics of home gardens, with lots of comments about the price of seedlings and potting soil and raised beds, fertilizers and pesticides and tools, the work of planting and tilling and weeding and watering, and the paltry payoff in sub-quality, slug damaged vegies that the kids won’t touch.

It’s been bothering me because there’s so many levels in that, I don’t know where to begin.

I was brought up in dire poverty. The kind of poverty where you don’t dare eat lunch with the other kids at school because you know you will be relentlessly bullied about the contents of your lunch box. The kind of poverty where kids in high school, even the ones with very cool parents, are forbidden to associate with you for fear it might rub off. The kind of poverty where you hitchhike to school to save the bus fare you earned working a carwash, in a skimpy bikini.

Poverty is not good, nor fair, nor deserved. You only have to look at the incomes of nurses and teachers and sole parents and farmers to know that. You only have to look at the income of African women. But the one good thing that comes out of it is that you learn you can survive it, at least in Australia, and maybe then you don’t fear it so much. I know at least one person, in her seventies, who has never experienced poverty in her life. She is so afraid of it she is willing to do unconscionable things to avoid it. I am very glad neither I nor my siblings will ever be that, and proud my kids will never be either. Being able to live on the smell of an oily rag is a useful skill, and only going to become more so.

But expensive as supermarket shopping is these days, starving is the least part of poverty. Charities, food banks, dumpster diving will give you food. But not dignity, opportunity, security, space to dream and plan and create, the means of production, to produce. So why do I feel so strongly that food gardening is such an important skill?

Doughnut economics is how I make sense of it. If you are in the “shortfall” area of the doughnut, life is so precarious that food gardening is an unaffordable luxury. Using food gardening to drag yourself out of that zone and into the doughnut is a Herculean task, expecially since you have to start with finding the time and resources to develop the skills. Seedlings and potting soil and raised beds, fertilizers and pesticides and tools – all those things are minor expenses, or make your own, if you know how. But developing the know-how takes the luxury of freedom from day-to-day survival concerns.

It makes no sense, ethically or economically, to land individuals with the responsibility for getting themselves into the doughnut. It’s our birthright as a living being on this planet, and besides, people in that shortfall area hold so much wasted potential. It takes a village to raise a child, and to care for elders and people with long and short term disabilities. It’s a social responsibility.

If you are in the doughnut though, food gardening is a way to live well, dare I say, to live very well even on its inner edge. If you have the freedom to learn how, you can live so well that it makes that outer edge … meh … who needs more than enough? Food gardening isn’t just about removing the cost of food from the bills. It’s about food security, food quality, nutrition, health, meditation, creative activity, consciousness of yourself as a biological being, even a keystone being. It’s a way you can contribute to maintaining the doughnut itself, fending off climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus loading and all the rest of the overshoot and girding up peace and justice, health, social equity and all the rest of the shortfall. It’s a way to live richer than Gina.

Posted in Ethical

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2 Comments

  1. Peter Heffernan

    Dear Linda,
    I’m sorry to hear of the plight you and Family were subjected to in those formative years.

    My Parents were subjected to the same shadow of the economy and self-worth trashing Great Depression…Mum’s home with a dirt floor, dominated by her Father’s alcoholism. Dad’s deranged fringe-dweller Parents, and their struggle with alcohol too.

    As for Gardening….as you rightly allude to, any activities that offer the promise of disentangling psychologically from the brutality of the hegemony Gramsci so eloquently mapped out offer escape from Oligarchy imposed emotional impoverishment and denigratory appraisals. To embrace the aesthetic of Humanure, urineure, Garden grown silver beet, backyard chooks, apple and avocado rootstock grown from seed, grafted to known cultivars from neighbours trees, roof water collection, blackberry bush eating Damara sheep, backyard food forests. Book writing. For me, through the sanity school provided my Mother, a medical career “island of sanity in a sea of Oligarchic madness”….with the Permaculture inspired backyard establishing for when the petrol runs out…The “home grown” aesthetic facilitates disentangling from Oligarch’s enculturation. A “Moses parting the waves moment”.

    Through Backyard Gardening, (and a fair bit of poaching) my grandfather grew himself beyond the reach of the the “modern”Pharaoh appraisal of “your sense of worth”, to some extent back to the “extended Family Affirmation” of old….

  2. Frogdancer Jones

    I’d also add that, once you’re set up, gardening is a way to spend hundreds of hours of entertainment where you’re at home, happily puddling around, and not out spending money in malls etc.
    And you can set up the garden gradually. As a single mother of 4, I probably took around 8 years to gradually set up my food forest in the suburbs, bit by bit. As I was adding to my garden, I was also adding to my knowledge.

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