The indoor work being done, this month has been the time for me to get serious about making the outside of the property where I live productive and beautiful. Lucky for me, it's been a warm, wet spring here in central MI, and this year I've got the resources to do a great deal. There's something so restorative about working outdoors with your hands and cultivating living things, especially in depressing times like these.

This is my bible. I'm not any kind of expert and I have no problem accepting that there are smarter and more experienced people out there to whom I should listen. But everything I've read suggests that raised beds are the way to go, and will deliver larger plants in greater quantities. Plus, they're easy to make and allow for the maximum productivity even in a minimal space.

Food is so central to our lives we often don't even really think about it. With all the recent immigration discussions, it's important that we think about the role immigrants play in delivering our food. Should we ever come to "a day without a Mexican," either due to massive protests and strikes or something sinister and Republican, a lot of us will have to go without the staples of our diets. Unless we're willing to step up and do the work ourselves. I'll say this- as hard as I'm working this spring, it's nothing compared to real farm labor. So thank you, farm laborers, for bringing the exotic foods I can't grow to my table.

In America, food is also tied to oil. There are very few non-organic farms that produce large quantities of food without petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. I've been saying it for a while now in my internet discussions, but when oil is at 300$/barrel, a lot of poor Americans are going to starve. To death. Invading Iran is a stupid idea on so many levels...

But the book I mentioned shows you how with effort and not too much money, you can become truly self-sufficient. A lot of people will argue that you can't, or can't cheaply and easily, but I believe it's time to rethink that position. Even city dwellers can produce large quantities of food. Rooftop and community gardens are just a start. For example, I just discovered that one can take a single seed potato, and put it in a trash can 1/4 filled with rich dirt, and produce a huge crop of potatoes by covering the plant with more dirt as it grows. There are ways to force growth and productivity for every plant, it seems. All without fertilizers that contain a petroleum derivative.

There are probably a thousand things one can do that I don't know of, ways in which a person with limited resources can supplement their larder with home grown foods. It takes time, and effort, and sometimes a real investment (building a greenhouse or stocking a fish pond, for example). But for the price of three months of cable TV, one can buy seeds and sets to fill even the largest of gardens. This year would be a really, really good time to get serious about gardening, if you are in a position to occasionally have concern about your food budget. Which I think even middle class people will have to have, very soon.

I'm poor enough to be very sensitive to fluctuations in food prices, and I've noticed that for example, the price of the type of cat food I buy has almost doubled since Bush took office. Now, I'm not going to grow much for my cat, but I'm highly motivated to grow more for myself, instead of eating increasingly spare yet costly meals. As I said to a friend recently, if there's any benefit to global climate change, it's that at least for now, we get longer and earlier growing seasons in much of the country. I'm going to take advantage of that, and I think you should too.

Anyone with ideas about growing, please share them. I’m all ears, even though the corn doesn’t go in until tomorrow. ;-)