Now this is my kind of challenge
We’ve heard about the 100 mile diet, and I talked about looking into eating within a 25 mile radius of your home. So how about the 100 foot challenge?
100 feet? Yep. Grow your own.
For this, you see how much of your food you can grow within 100 feet of your house.
For those of you who took my advice to start a garden, this might be easy (yes, even in winter!). For those of you just starting out, it might take a few weeks to get something going, but it’s not difficult either. Even if there’s snow on the ground outside, the inside of your home or apartment might be brimming with possibilities.
A sunny window inside or in the garage can be a spot to start some lettuce or radish seeds, or you can make a cold frame outside with some leftover wood and glass in a few hours. A dark area might be good to grow mushrooms, start seeds to move to the sunny spot later, or sprout some nuts or seeds for a sandwich or stir-fry.
This morning, I went outside and got a great salad for dinner. Snow pea greens, chard, carrots, brassica leaves, and some red beet greens for color. A few layers of row covers I bought for $10 a roll (I haven’t even used up one roll yet!) for when the nights drop below freezing, and everything stays nice and frost-free. It’s supposed to be good to 24F; when it gets below that (probably later this month), some plastic dropcloths from Home Depot draped over that and staked down should keep the wind off even better.
That salad would have been my contribution to the 100 foot challenge tonight. The rest of it was home-fried (locally-grown) chicken, with homemade french fries (local) and onion rings (also local, although the corn meal to bread all this wasn’t). Everyone loved it. 
So don’t feel bad if you can’t do much yet. Look around your home. Look around your property. Think about what you might be able to do, and do it!
January 10th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Well, at the moment in my unit I get an average of 2lbs/week of food from about 240 sq ft, of which 40 sq ft is raised bed food garden, with another 20 sq ft of non-food stuff growing. I think the non-food stuff is necessary to attract wildlife which helps in production, acts as companion plants to the food, provides green manure - and also makes it more pretty, which encourages me to be out there and care for the food plants. So basically we get 400lbs/60 sq ft, or 6lbs/sq ft annually.
This takes me about two hours a week, but an hour of that is the watering. Right now my state has a drought, it’ll probably be long-term because of climate change (it’s been going the better part of a decade already). So in the summer the garden’s water is mostly greywater. Because of the layout of my home, I have to bucket it out. I wait till I hear the washing machine draining, then chuck a 2.5 gallon bucket under the out hose. When it’s full, I raise the lid to stop the machine, take the bucket and put it straight on the garden. Then I come back, close the lid, and fill the bucket again. So it’s getting 5 gallons a day on the 40 sq ft (I don’t bother watering the non-food plants, they have to struggle along), or 1 gallon per 5 sq ft. That’s plenty, except on the 40C (104F) or more days we’ve been having, when it needs twice that.
In our new place we’re moving to, we’ll have a slightly larger yard, but it’s all concrete so I’ll have to go to containers. But the laundry is the back room, so greywater use will be much easier. Apparently people get better yields from containers than raised beds, but it’s more work. And I’ll have to take some time to physically haul all the containers and the soil about, and afford to buy them all. But I hope to get back to 2lbs/week within a year.
It’s not a lot compared to our actual consumption, but everyone’s gotta start somewhere. I view it as building skills for food supply, rather than actual food supply. In the case of some kind of crisis or general collapse, that green common area between the units, and the nature strips in the street, and the railway land, that would all get used - and I’d know how, which some years ago I didn’t.
Here I talk about “the shape of food to come”, and the sorts of yields people can get from a particular sized yard. Those are the best figures I could get, and confirmed as roughly right by neighbours who grow more than me; but I welcome corrections from people more experienced than me.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
That’s a good article. I think it’s true that we’ll end up moving away from wheat in our diet, maybe not totally but in the quantity we use, just because it is so space and labor intensive.
Thanks for sharing what you’re doing with greywater. I had thought of using my washwater but hadn’t figured out how yet. Your method is quite elegant.
January 13th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I never thought of standing there by the washing machine as it fills up my bucket as “elegant”. It seems extraordinarily non-glamorous.
Yesterday I was at a friend’s place helping him clean up his garden. Of course he with a large garden doesn’t enjoy caring for it, while me with who enjoys it is getting a small patch of concrete!
I was able to get across a few better ideas to him. He’d poisoned his weeds, of course the poison doesn’t reach the roots so they come up again, and the poison kills the plants he does want - woops. I told him, “just pull the thing up and leave its roots in the sun to dry, leave the thing there to act as mulch and eventually return to the soil.”
I also noticed that when they pulled away dead bits of plant, they tossed them away, rather than returning them to the soil. Not a mystery why their soil was dry and hard.
And so on. None of it felt “elegant”, though!
January 14th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
LOL, an “elegant” process in science is one that is simple and requires little effort. Much of what works in nature is that way.
Good job on converting your friend away from poisons! Quite an accomplishment.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I just had to convince him that not using poisons was less effort. See, he used poisons because spritz-spritz seems easier than bend-yank-toss. But when he realised that it’d be spritz-spritz forever, and added in wife-complains-I-killed-her-favourite-plant, bend-yank-toss suddenly seemed much less effort.
Whereas arguments about not poisoning the Earth and peak oil affecting future prices of herbicides wouldn’t have been quite as effective. I think “wife-complains” was the knockout punch to the “just spray it” idea.