A lot of dreamers here who never actually tried to grow something. A lot of YouTube video knowledge but no practical experience.
Its damn difficult to grow your own food. I think buying canned goods and storing them is the best option for almost everyone instead of trying to grow your own.
As someone who has been trying to grow tomatoes in containers for about 10 years, I can confirm that it really is difficult. It took me about 5 years to achieve fairly consistent results and get the hang of properly amending the soil, planting correctly, watering, pruning etc. And I still have years where the production is really low, largely due to fungal diseases.
see what you should have done is just toss some rotten ones onto your driveway or behind the shed and ignored them and next year you'd have had the biggest baddest bitchingest tomato plants you'd ever seen
Growing food isn't hard but takes knowledge and time, and even then there is no way in fuck you can be self sufficient.
Natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, which is then used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere. Only about 6% of natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, so even if the price were to rise substantially, we could divert natural gas from other uses and have plenty for making ammonia. We also have other ways of producing hydrogen, it's just that natural gas is more established.
PEM electrolyzers paired with cheap solar in countries with high insolation can now produce hydrogen for less than the cost of natural gas, but we're only recently starting to see the construction of the large-scale green ammonia plants needed to accomplish this. Egypt is currently constructing a 100-MW green ammonia plant powered by solar energy. Even if you didn't have enough PEM eletrolyzers you could still just pass current through some salt water and produce hydrogen, albeit much less efficiently.
It's not going to be a catastrophic issue.
Fun fact: Fritz Haber, the German guy that invented the Haber-Bosch process is the same Fritz Haber that developed a way to use the chlorine gas in chemical warfare. He was personally overseeing its effect in the battle of Ypres.
And the Bosch in this instance is not Robert Bosch, founder of the company Bosch, but his nephew Carl Bosch, founder of IG Farben. Famous for, among other things, zyklon b.
Clara Immerwahr, who was married to Fritz Haber and was a successful chemist in her own right, spoke out against his research as a "perversion of the ideals of science" and "a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life." She ended her own life the day before he traveled to the eastern front to oversee the use of chlorine gas against Russian troops.
we've got plenty of rich to eat
It's a little late to start a food garden. You won't be getting any harvests for a while, and it won't be much. Best to stock up on shelf-stable goods now, and build community for mutual aid.
It's spring in most of the northern hemisphere and therefore the next months are the best time to start a garden. Yes, chances are that you won't feed your family from it. But it's fun, it is a great way to get fresh food and if you have the option to do it, you should
Oh, yeah. Gardening is lovely, just don't expect to be able to feed yourself (or anyone else) in the immediate future by planting some tomatoes by your kitchen window, starting now. It would be a while before you could harvest, and it would be a very small yield, assuming you get a good healthy crop. A lot of people act like the average Joe or Jane could feed their household and neighbors with minimal effort and a few square feet of free space by their window, when that's just not realistic - at least, not for most people.
All I have is tomatoes...guess that will have to do.
Is this a good time to mention that animal ag is the most wasteful form of food we have? Further, consider capitalism and western rich countries. If the choice is between feedin poor people and feeding cows, what choice will the money make?
You think food prices will come back down after it's all over?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
As if you'd need to ask that question...
You should always feel free to grow a garden, but you shouldn’t necessarily expect it to be cheaper than buying food. Especially the first year, if you don’t live in a place where you can just dig up some dirt and chunk seeds in it. Even if you do you should make sure the soil isn’t literally toxic first, especially since it’s common to have a buildup of things like lead or arsenic from now-outlawed fertilizers that can be absorbed by plants.
My grandparents planted maybe half an acre? Of crops for 10 people, and it was supplemental, not a complete replacement. It also takes a lot of work and can go to shit if the weather is bad. You can account for some of this by planting a variety of crops, trying to head off drainage and shade issues before they start, and with supplemental watering. But don’t expect everything to be super productive every year, especially in the age of climate change. My sister had some plants not put out at all last year (peppers).
Who wants a kitchen garden?
Who wants to care for a kitchen garden? It's not as simple as putting seeds into the ground and waiting until it grows. You have to dig up the site. You have to water it in a drought. You have to pull out the weed. You might even have to fight against insects, or use fertilizer. 19 out of 20 people I knew had given up on the idea of a kitchen garden.
I am a successful gardener.
You can't and don't want to eat 20lbs of tomato in a week. I use maybe 2-4lbs and the rest of it rots or has to be given away. I'm lucky if consume 1/4 of what I produce.
And that's how crops come in, all at the same time in abundance. It's not like you can pick 4 tomatoes each day and they just hang out for weeks on the vine. There is about a 4-6 week widow in which all the stuff you have spent 5 months growing, is edible off the vine. You start in April and then you don't really get anything until August, and then by Mid Sept, the plants stop producing and are dead by Oct.
And if you want to preserve it, that's a lot more work and you need the space and equipment to store dozens and dozens of jarred/canned veg. And at that point it's no longer a small kitchen garden.
oh and by the way if you give me that 'community sharing!' stuff. no. literally everyone's crops are also coming in at the same time. that's why you see people leaving baskets of veg on the stops all around and nobody takes it, because they already have their own from their own gardens.
That is very different from a commercial farm who is able to have dozens of rotating crops and crop varieties with the expertise to manage it and also the ability to distribute it commercially.
Also, groundhogs will fuck up your garden, and they dig tunnels and climb fences. You have to basically build a big cage around your garden, floor included.
Most chemical fertilizer is synthesised from LNG.
The two biggest exporters are Russia (sanctioned) and Qatar (all plants shut down)
It's not just fertilizer:
it takes about 7.3 units of (primarily) fossil energy to produce one unit of food energy
Assessing the sustainability of the US food system: a life cycle perspective
With all the fertilizer, heavy equipment and agricultural practices the food production today is very inefficient from an energy perspective.
Without cheap, abundant energy available the whole food production system is not sustainable
Good thing my country exports 90% of its agricultural produce, so if we start getting hungry then we'll just export a bit less.
(We learned the hard way a long time ago when we ran out of potatoes.)
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
Don’t assume your food won’t continue to be sold overseas if the growers/wholesalers can make more money that way.
Ireland was exporting food during the potato famine.
*Britian was exporting food from Ireland during the famine.
I mean, you exported 90% of your agricultural produce back then, too.
What are pulses?
Ohhh..
Legumes are plants in the pea family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae), or the fruit or seeds of such plants. When used as a dry grain for human consumption, the seeds are also called pulses.
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