“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
When the Second World War broke out the British were subjected to submarine warfare in a nearly successful attempt to starve them into submission by denying them access to imported food. They survived to eventually triumph by growing “Victory Gardens” to provide their own fruits and vegetables.
Untilled land was dug up and crops planted to make up the shortage as people learned once more to feed themselves. Since this provided fresher and therefore more nutritious produce the health of the general population actually improved!
Today we are threatened with an equally dangerous situation with our ally to the south, and it behooves us to anticipate tariffs placed on agricultural products from the suppliers in the United States we have hitherto relied on; even if still available they are almost certain to cost far more than we can afford to pay.
It is time we learn from history and plant as much of our own food as possible, to be ripe when needed. Unless we want to go hungry, Canadians must reduce our dependence on imported foods.
It is better to be prepared for future possibilities than to expect someone else to help us, so here are a few suggestions.
We can start with a few easy to grow crops that don’t require a big investment. We don’t need to buy expensive bags of potting soil or compost since it’s almost free to make. One can go out into the woods and scrape both off the forest floor.
Those of us with our own yards can sacrifice some lawn space or access a plot in a local allotment garden. It doesn’t take much to grow at least some of your own diet, and there is no time better than now to get started.
If you live in an apartment, vegetables grow in containers on the balcony, but you need to be careful about how much weight yours will carry. If you don’t have a balcony or patio you can still grow them indoors on a shelf. In my younger days I bought used lights at a thrift store to suspend overhead and grew food indoors. I dug up soil from the woods and brought it inside to pot up, made compost tea to water seedlings and later I added a compost/fertilizer mix. You can do this affordably and actually eat better food than California can provide!
A compost heap can be made in a garbage can by layering weeds and kitchen scraps. Make compost tea to spray on the plants by immersing vegetable scraps in water to ferment for a week before decanting off the elixir that adds nutrients, enzymes and beneficial organisms that help plants grow.
If making a shelf with lights is too difficult or expensive, put the plants in a south facing window and turn them from time to time to ensure all sides face the sun.
Indoors or outdoors, start with plants that offer the most bang for your buck, like greens and pea shoots. Lettuce, kale and herbs come to mind and are easy to get going. New Zealand spinach (not a true spinach, but tastes much like it) grows well indoors, as do onions and garlic greens. Try radishes and small turnips and carrots. I let some turnips go to seed in my garden and the seeds blew up the hill to grow in a pile of wood chips. I didn’t even water or weed them, but they grew to be huge and tasty.
Plants grown indoors may not contain all the nutrients they’d receive outside, but it’s better to grow and eat our own produce than to not have them at all. With the Florida Orange man threatening to cut off access to our usual sources we need to take a page out of granddad’s book and plant victory gardens of our own.
The corollary to George Santayana’s famous quote can be “Those who remember their history won’t go hungry!”
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
