patrick.net

Patrick says

What if everyone just had a big garden out front instead of a big lawn?

Out front because homeless need veggies too?

BTW, lawns do serve a purpose - they make the area near them cooler. Plastic grass has the opposite effect. I read a story about a guy whose front yard was next to a bus stop. He got tired of people sitting on his lawn waiting for the bus, but couldn't do anything about it. Until he read that astroturf has this effect of raising the temps. So he replaced his grass with the plastic stuff - and voila, no more laungers on his property.

Lawns are firebreaks. That's their original purpose. It's so the house wouldn't burn down if there was a forest fire.

You will only get a few growing seasons out of those wooden planters. If you're going to go through all of that trouble, why not excavate the top few feet of soil then replace it with two feet of rich fertile garden soil? With the price of wood, not only would it be more practical, but cheaper and much more growing real estate.
And what have they got there really, a couple weeks of garden greens? That image doesn't look very productive considering all of the expense that went into it. I would expect more fruiting vegetables, than cruciferous, lettuces and greens

My wife made a wooden planter with a metal mesh bottom covered in plastic sheeting because:

1. the moles would pull her plants down underground and eat them
2. nearby trees would constantly sent shoots up into the garden

She solved both of those problems that way, though it's not very organic.

Tenpoundbass says

You will only get a few growing seasons out of those wooden planters. If you're going to go through all of that trouble, why not excavate the top few feet of soil then replace it with two feet of rich fertile garden soil? With the price of wood, not only would it be more practical, but cheaper and much more growing real estate.
And what have they got there really, a couple weeks of garden greens? That image doesn't look very productive considering all of the expense that went into it. I would expect more fruiting vegetables, than cruciferous, lettuces and greens

I'll tell you why they have boxes, because gardening is a pain. When I was a kid, we had a huge garden, and it was the kids that had to tend it. Weeding is backbreaking work, so is digging up potatoes. Kids are shorter though, so it's not as painful as being an adult. I hated gardening. Basically, you had to tend the damn thing the entire summer, and then in fall, dig up everything, and can it. Food is only in season for about a month, preservation is the next step. Shelling peas, snipping of string beans, freezing berries, canning to make jam, pickling, pressure canning carrots - it was a lot of work.

I do miss pickles, but they are easy enough to make yourself by running over to a produce store, and picking up some cucumbers, dill, garlic, and canning salt. For about $20, you can get 5 quarts of pickles - takes 2 weeks for them to be fully pickled, and they will last a year easily. You so have to get the right cucumbers, you won't find them in a typical store, you really have to go to a produce store for them. You really cannot buy authentic dill pickles anywhere that I've found and there's a weird obsession in the industry to add sugar to EVERYTHING.

richwicks says

You really cannot buy authentic dill pickles anywhere

The Sonomy Brinery pickles at Trader Joe's are very good.

Patrick says

richwicks says

You really cannot buy authentic dill pickles anywhere

The Sonomy Brinery pickles at Trader Joe's are very good.

Maybe, but I recently made pickles. I'm kind of set for the year.

richwicks says

Lawns are firebreaks. That's their original purpose. It's so the house wouldn't burn down if there was a forest fire.

In CA I can imagine that's true, but most of the country doesn't have fires that are a threat to housing. In the midwest you just have a lawn.

I'm starting to realize that much of the national narrative is based on a flawed view. You make sense when saying they are firebreaks. But outside of the mountain west there's literally no fire risk for the most part. 58% of the country lives east of the Mississippi river. 80% east of the Rockies. The fire thing is the west coast and rockies.

And yes Wisconsin and Minnesota have fires, but it's rare and generally doesn't effect homes because it rains in this part of the country consistently. Lawn isn't a determining factor in it here. Smokies occasionally have fires in TN and the Carolinas.

What I'm saying is for 80% of the country it is a status thing. Not much to do with fires. My lawn is better than Ted or Joe's. Desert Southwest doesn't much care either. The fire problems are in CA, OR, WA, MT, UT and CO for the most part.

WookieMan says

What I'm saying is for 80% of the country it is a status thing. Not much to do with fires. My lawn is better than Ted or Joe's. Desert Southwest doesn't much care either. The fire problems are in CA, OR, WA, MT, UT and CO for the most part.

I can only tell you how they started out. I grew up in NY near the border of Canada in the middle of nowhere. Firebreaks ARE needed there. I've seen plenty of forest fires there when I was a kid, before NY started actively managing the forest again. California doesn't.

richwicks says

When I was a kid, we had a huge garden

You went on to describe how I grew up.

I make half sour refrigerator pickles, don't last as long as dill pickles. But the biggest fans of my pickles are people who say they can't stand pickles. I am up to about 7 jars I have to make when I make a batch. As several family members and friends want a jar. I buy those cukes that are a cross between Kirby and mini English cukes, they come about 5 to 8 in a bag, just enough to fit in a guart Mason jar.

My brine 1 cup water, 1 cup white vinegar, 1 tblsp of salt, 10 black pepper corns, 10 Sichuan pepper corns, 1 bay leaf, 3 to 4 garlic cloves. Put in a sauce pot and bring to a boil. Add two sprigs of fresh dill to a quart jar, pack in 6 to 8 pickles, pour in liquid while still hot. Let jars sit until just above lukewarm, place lids and let finish cooling. The jars will end up sealed by time they fully cool. Left sealed they will last for three months. But only about 2 to 3 weeks once open. Even longer I guess, but I put off because the whole thing starts getting an amber tint from oxidization. Rather than the nice dill green it had going before. The pickles are ready to eat within hours. Though the magic hour for them are 24 hours later to one week.

Those gardens look easy but, pests , rodents , deer, birds all going to eat it before you. Gardening is lot of work.

Tenpoundbass says

10 Sichuan pepper corns

Good idea, man.

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Then there are the unprocessed foods. These are suffused in pesticides and herbicides, painted and waxed so as to preserve their appearance and what flavour they retain from the mineral-stripped soil in which they were chemically fertilized. The meat is hormonal and antibiotic, injected with dyes to simulate freshness, stitched together from scraps using glue to give the appearance of steak.

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Over the last generation or so our agribusiness and food distribution system has engaged in a vast sleight of hand. Actual food has been slowly replaced with the simulation of food, without anyone really noticing. Sometimes this was done openly, as with the encouragement to use the toxic sludge called ‘margarine’ rather than the butter we’d been eating for thousands of years. Saturated fats are bad for your heart, you know1. In other cases it was done with no great fanfare: using the engine lubricant called canola oil in place of olive oil to make mayonnaise, or substituting high fructose corn syrup for cane sugar in Coca-Cola. Recipes were quietly altered, by and large no one noticed the difference, and corporations pocketed the difference arising from their lower production costs, happily externalizing the costs inflicted by the ruined health of the general populace that this mass poisoning resulted in.

KgK one says

Those gardens look easy but, pests , rodents , deer, birds all going to eat it before you. Gardening is lot of work.

Put in electric fence today, keeps them out.

richwicks says

Weeding is backbreaking work

Yes!

I made a raised bed of asparagus, now I just have to wait 3 years for them to grow to the point I can eat them. The bed will only get better over the years and they come back bigger every year.