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Freedom Gardens that Will Thrive in Small Spaces
Our nation has been on a collision course with simple, natural living for quite some time. People in cities are crammed into high-rise apartment complexes, working 12 hours per day, eating fast food as a daily staple, and getting sicker by the minute.
An Organic Food Bust —Your Tax Dollars at Work!
They came in the late morning, a belligerent gang terrorizing the family with weapons drawn for nearly 6 hours. All of their personal possessions were searched; $10,000 worth of food was taken as were computers and cell phones. Ten of the family members held at gunpoint were children including infants and toddlers.1,2
Did this happen in a backward, lawless Third World country? Were the armed thugs part of a murderous criminal gang cruising the streets for innocent victims? No to both questions. It happened in LaGrange, Ohio in December of 2008. The armed goons were agents from the Ohio Department of Agriculture, the Loraine County Department of Health, and the local police. They had with them the type of search warrant used to bust drug dealers.3
The family’s crime? There doesn’t seem to be one, unless running a successful food co-op for folks who want to save money on bulk purchases of organic food is now against the law.
The co-op called Manna Storehouse has been run by John and Jacqueline Stowers since 1999. It includes 60 regular members who pool their resources and buy in bulk quantities directly from organic growers across the state of Ohio. This enables them to get a discount on the healthiest foods available — beef, pork, eggs, milk, cheese, produce, poultry, and grains —all produced without man-made chemicals, hormones, pesticides, dyes, and additives.
Start Small — My Best Advice for Beginning Gardeners
The days of growing up on a small organic farm in New Jersey were far behind me when I dug my first garden as an adult. It was only five or six feet square and done at my wife’s behest so she could have some home-grown tomatoes. We crowded in half a dozen tomato plants and a couple of short rows of potatoes using spuds from the store that had sprouted. We then neglected the patch pretty much until harvest. Amazingly we got tomatoes and potatoes.
Back to the Land: One Man’s Story
On hearing Barbra Kingsolver promote her new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I thought, “been there done that.” She and her family moved to a farm and vowed that for one year they would eat only food they grew themselves or that was raised locally. My wife, also Barbara, and I moved to our farm in Maine 35 years ago and have been living close to the land ever since.
I too, wrote a book about our experience of raising the majority of our food — which I titled Gardening for Independence.
We were part of the “back to the land” movement of the 1970s. I don’t know that any of us in this so-called movement knew we were part of any movement. Some say they were influenced by Scott and Helen Nearing — early green living pioneers. We weren’t. For us, it is just the way things worked out.
