“In your retrosuburbia, what are you going to do about humans being the garden decimating wildlife?”
It’s the question I get asked most often by people skeptical that you can gear up for resilience in the suburbs. Not “how are you going to grow enough staples” or “what are you going to do about internet”. It reflects where we are as a society, I guess. But the picture of the rugged individualist, dedicated to self sufficiency in isolation is not permaculture.
And I wouldn’t want it, even if it was possible. Even if I could produce all my own food, using tools I smelted in my backyard forge, we still share one planet’s air, water, soil, oceans, weather, climate. I remember a quote that I can’t find any more from a John Seymour book, that growing food is the easy bit. It’s building the social systems that enable it that is the hard part.
It’s a complex question, intertwined threads of the power in being part of a community, with defence against vandalism, theft, and sociopathy. Enjoying the insurance of mutual aid, mixed in with collective responsiblity for people who, for any number of reasons, contribute in off-topic ways, or not at all.
After nearly 40 years living in an off-grid intentional community, I still don’t have many answers. All I know is that it is both much harder, and much more obvious, than it might seem. So this is a thread about exploring the ways in which we can build community. Starting with the low hanging fruit.
The more gardens there are in my neighbourhood, the less likely mine will get raided. So I’m all in for encouraging, supporting, and contributing to that. And a very easy way to do it is to share seeds. Locally adapted saved seed, fresh and in season, in small quantities, bred from heirloom gardeners’ varieties rather than commercial varieties – it’s a treasure as a gift to anyone starting a food garden, but for the giver its a negligible cost. If you save your own seeds, you will always have many times more than you can possibly use before they go out of date – plants are prolific seed producers. And gearing up to sell them is a whole nuther enterprise, not worth it for a backyard producer.
Many years ago, Morag Gamble from Our Permaculture Life did a post about little origami envelopes for sharing saved seed, and I’ve been using them ever since. Such a neat little idea. Making up a few little packets of seed to give away each time I dry seed for saving for myself takes almost no effort. I put them out on a little table on the footpath, and they are gone within the day. Very occasionally, I see someone picking some out and have a chat, but mostly they go to anonymous footpath users. And occasionally, as I walk down to the park, I look over a fence and see a lettuce I can be pretty sure is one of mine.
What a great idea, I often save seed but hate the plastic. Thank you.
I couldn’t remember where I’d read about this, so thanks for posting. I made some seed packets to give away by sewing little pockets from the pretty wrappings of a certain brand of loo paper, and used a sticky label to keep them closed and write the name of the seeds.
What a nice idea! Reminds me of a story I read once that during the depression, they made flour sacks with pretty prints on them, so they could be recycled into girl’s dresses.
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