Sustainable gardening...

Sometime in the past 2 or 3 years I saw a video on youtube about a teacher/professor who was, with his students, running a vegetable garden on a city rooftop. What has been driving me to distraction (because I can’t find the video after voluminous searching) is how they were doing it.

Basically they had what in the states we would call a clothesline pole with 4 or 5 arms and 4 or 5 layers of arms under each leg of the thing. So that it would look like a multi-layered pinwheel. What they did on each arm on each layer was hang a trough, like a roof gutter, and run a drip line over the top trough of each leg. The water would percolate down through the layers so that all got their water. They had even set up a way to rotate the center pole so that all plants received the same level of sunlight.

What was striking to me was the numbers (which I can’t remember) of vegetables they get out of this system. They had several of these contraptions on this rooftop and he said that they produced several times the amount of veggies they could have gotten if they had covered the whole roof with soil. They showed on film how good-sized carrots and even potatoes were growing in what looked to be merely 3 or 4 inches at most of dirt in each gutter. The vegetables were literally only resting in the soil and growing beyond the surface of the soil, that is how shallow the dirt was.

When my son was 4 or 5 we would plant a sunflower seed in a tiny little pot and sit it in the windowsill for him to watch as it grew. As any of you who have done the same know, they would get several feet high if you let them, just from a handful of dirt. So it all made a lot of sense to me.

The system I am describing looks to me as if it would be truly a time-effective way to take care of a family. So I've posted this in the hopes that some in the evolver community know of the video and can share a link to it.

It’s been coming up in my mind and in some conversations I’ve had the last couple of months as a practical solution to feeding ourselves, either as a family or as a community. A friend was telling me recently that her experiences of working on 3 different organic farms has left her with the feeling that it was too much work to farm. Not that she didn’t enjoy it or the lifestyle or anything, but that the amount of labor required just to sustain yourself felt off-balance.

I have been reading and listening to some off-the-wall stuff about diet and nutrition fairly regularly the last year or so and have slowly come to the conclusion that, like most everything else people do, our ideas of what we ‘need’ to sustain ourselves nutritionally is way out of proportion to the deeper reality. Part of my influence has been my own recent experience in experimenting with my diet, as well as experience further back in my past when I was very broke financially speaking. I really do not eat very much, particularly compared to other people. I do pay attention to my body and what it feels it needs, and then follow those perceptions. It works for me. In living like this though, I contemplate the ‘common perception’ about a balanced diet. Even among the organic types and the spiritually enlightened types, there is a kind of presumption that we each need on an annual basis a massive amount of food, and I kinda doubt that is really true.

The key thing to me about the video is exactly that - that it would be helpful for anyone who wants to exert more responsibility for their nutrition etc, to consider the amount of food vs. the amount of effort required to obtain it. I am not one who believes that everyone everywhere should, or needs to, be busy x# of months/yr to be able to eat well. And yet if I want to eat well, eat consciously, I need to do so effectively, otherwise there won't be much difference between me and a hunter/gatherer who spent all day worrying about his belly and nothing else (well, maybe sex! :p).

Any comments on these thoughts would be very welcome, and the link to the video would be awesome! It may be that I dreamed it all but... well, my dreams are usually not so practical if ya know what I mean.

Peace!
Steve