I know where a lot of suburban lawn nazis live, people who obsessively shave their lawn down to golf course turf, and every week I fill up my truck with their bagged clippings to use as mulch. About the only thing I compost is kitchen waste, because it’s a lot less work just to directly use leaves and grass clippings as sheet compost without the intermediate step. Turn it in over the winter, and it’ll be fully decayed to humus the next spring. A few years of this, and your soil will be black and crumbly and swarming with foot-long nightcrawlers.

Good mulching (get free mulch from your county dump if it’s available, or free grass clippings from your neighbors, making sure they haven’t put weed-and-feed applications on their lawn recently) suppresses most weeds, too, cutting down on the total time needed for maintenance.

Thanks for the link. I read it, and did find it usefu.

FreeDem,

You’re right, flexbility of hours is a sticking point for many people.

My point with the labor requirement for gardening is that it still requires an amount of time–an amount of time that most people probably couldn’t do with their standard 40 hour work week. And few jobs offer flexibility of hours, unless you’re proposing someone work part time at McDonald’s and part time gardening.

Excellent points. And I agree with Kevin, it’s great to hear from someone with personal experience. I just want to note this:

“the collapse of the knowledge base essential to diversified farming.”

I think this is one of the biggest problems facing us in the coming years. But because of this, it is also one of the biggest opportunities. This knowledge is out there, in people like you (even if you feel like you don’t know enough, you clearly know more from your lifetime experience than I do from reading a few books). The problem is going to be getting your knowledge back out into widespread circulation. The better job done in that respect, the easier our transition into a more sustainable economy will be (as always, absent state interference in the effort).

You’re probably right about the subsidies. The only practical effect, though, is they’ll exacerbate the “fiscal crisis of the state” without making a dent in the price of energy and transportation inputs. So we’ll wind up with budget deficits over a trillion $$, and nothing to show for it.

The good news about gardening is that it’s a better than one-to-one tradeoff with wage labor, at least for those around or below median income. It takes less labor to produce food on your own property than to earn the money to buy it. The total labor cost (including labor to buy gardening and canning supplies) is about a third less for home-grown and -canned tomatoes, for example, than for canned Del Monte tomatoes from the supermarket. And real organic tomatoes from the farmer’s market? Fuggedaboudit.

You’re the one on the ground there, and I may be all wet on this. Am I?

In the long run, yes. But in the short run, I more than expect the push from government to be to prop up the failing subsidies to centralization. Which will do little more than waste resources that could be used to adjusting society. My greatest concern is a government that keeps us from solving the problems of Peak Oil.

The labor required for home gardening and a more household approach to production means that either we’re going to have to shift back to a single wage-earner, or two wage-earners with reduced work loads.

I grew up and still live in Washington, Iowa, (35 miles SSW of Iowa City). My ancestors were Amish farmers who came to Washington County in the 1840’s. When I finished high school in 1961, the county was mainly small farms (a quarter section–160 acres–or less). Now the average is twice that–350 acres. Even this average is deceiving as most grain farmers farm rented land as well as their own land.

In 1961 most farms were diverse. My uncle farmed 80 acres and had milk cows, sheep, hogs and chickens. He grew oats, alfalfa hay, and corn. He had a large kitchen garden and an orchard. He was able to feed his family from the farm and had a cash income from wool and feeder pigs sufficient to pay his taxes and buy a new “Mennonite Special” Chevrolet every three years. Today most farms specialize in monoculture (grain/soybeans) crops or single animal livestock. I rarely see a farm garden, chicken house or a still functioning orchard.

This leads me to the my first concern: the collapse of the knowledge base essential to diversified farming. Farmers no longer have a broad range of farming knowledge and experience. The average age of farmers in Iowa is around 60 and most farm kids are leaving after high school.

The second problem is the collapse of the farm, hamlet, village, small town infrastructure. My own family farmed near the hamlet of Noble. At the beginning of the 20th century it had a general store, blacksmith, cabinet shop and grain mill. It was served by narrow gauge rail. Today, there is nothing left but the empty store building and a few houses. My home town of Washington (pop. 7200) has lost most of its independent retailers. The independent grocers, pharmacies, clothing stores, etc., are gone. To buy anything other than food or Wal-Mart junk requires a 70 mile round trip to Iowa City. The smaller towns in the county are in even sadder shape. Most small towns no longer have schools (the country school has been long gone) and families depend on buses to get their kids to centralized schools. When I started high school most of the small towns still had high schools. By the time I graduated only three large consolidated high schools were left.

Much of the transportation infrastructure is also gone. In 1961 the town was served by two mainline railroads as well as local line rail connections to several other small towns and to the river transport system in Burlington. Abandoned rail right-of-ways have been returned to the original land owners or converted to bike/foot trails. Only one mainline railroad is left.

We do have better road transportation. Many farm-to-market roads have been paved and there is a 4-lane highway to the nearest urban center (Iowa City). However, many county roads have been abandoned and are no longer maintained because the farmsteads they supported have been abandoned. Many of the rural non-highway bridges are no longer safe. Washington has no public transportation. The only way to get anywhere out of town is by automobile.

The private farm infrastructure is also gone. Few working farms (other than Amish farms) still have barns or chicken houses. Orchards are either derelict or have been ripped out for crop land. Fences and fence rows have been destroyed to get a few more acres for corn. Many farmsteads have been abandoned with the farmhouse and out buildings now derelict.

The upshot of all this is that the area cannot support an increase in faming population. To return to a small farm diversified agriculture would require both land reform and a large investment in both public and private infrastructure and in agricultural education. Without land reform those returning to the land would end up at best as wage slaves to the large landowners and at worst serfs to a new landed gentry.Without significant investment in infrastructure there would be no housing and no nearby schools or stores.

Good points. Kunstler is a good source of examples of this kind of ass-brained approach, although he’s far from being a principled anti-statist. On the lawn thing, he gave the example of old prewar neihborhoods in Georgetown, where the old houses had been grandfathered in when design plattes were changed to require massive setbacks for new houses. When an old house burned down, the replacement had to be built to the platte’s specs. So you had a whole street full of houses built maybe fifteen feet from the sidewalk, with nice shade trees and a front porch–interrupted by one Brady Bunch-style split-level ranch with a front lawn like a golf course.

And zoning laws against neighborhood groceries in suburbs, or against walkup apartments over downtown businesses, etc., are a monstrosity.

I reserve special hatred for the Property Values Nazis you describe, who seem to think I’m obligated to arrange my affairs in a way that maximizes the market value of their McMansions. I’m very much of a mind that the main purpose of a house is its enjoyment and use. Action by my neighbors that actively impedes the use and enjoyment of my property is a legitimate object for legal action: unreasonably loud or smelly livestock, pollution to the water table or air, etc. But the idea that they are obligated to forego productive use of their own property because it might reduce the resale value of mine is an abomination.

Even now, with gas prices skyrocketing and suburban home values decreasing, there’s plenty of snob-zoning laws requiring sprawl: new homes must be built on a minimum of one acre of land, must be a minimum size, etc. Want to dent food costs by turning your backyard into a big garden? No, sorry, zoning codes require smooth green lawns. Want to save electricity by drying clothes on a clothesline, or installing ugly solar panels on your roof? Verboten. And if you check the Websites of those businesses selling small windmills for residential use, you’ll find a thousand caveats warning you to make sure you get government permission before you even THINK about trying to put a windmill in your yard.

Government regulation got us into a lot of this mess, and government regulation’s going to make it a lot harder to get out of it.