Circumstances have conspired to create an explosion in backyard gardens. I heard this first anecdotally about a month ago from my friends in New York City, who reported that the nurseries near their farm in Vermont were just about out of everything. And now it’s hitting the newswires.
The backyard garden may conjure up patriotic memories of the Victory Gardens of World War II, but as the article notes, the last time that Americans really got serious about gardening was the Oil Shock of 1975. And sure enough, backyard and urban gardens were a central theme in the World Without Oil game – and local food and guerrilla gardening [1] [2], too.
It’s easy to see why – A garden turns some dirt, some water, some seeds, some weeding and some sun into food – the most efficient solar power device known to man. And as many WWO players cautioned, it’s good to start now: gardening is a skill that takes years to acquire – best not to count on a lifesaving bounty your first (or second) time out. Photo of the Farmers Market in Union Square, June 2008.
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June 26, 2008 at 4:34 am
jeff-nhn
You can be succesfful gardening your first time if you stick to vegetables that are easier to grow. Tomatoes, radishes, green beans, cucumbers etc. are all easy to grow.
June 26, 2008 at 9:37 am
Varin aka IllianaSpeedster
When I was planning our garden a couple of months ago, the hubbie teased saying I was “gardening for the apocolypse”. I doubled our garden’s size and converted a former flower area to a mini-cornfield. Now that money is getting tighter, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea anymore!
June 26, 2008 at 1:04 pm
PeakProphet
Boy have we learned a lot this year in terms of gardening. I have so much useful information to share… I wish I knew the best way to do it. I really, really miss WWO as a central information clearinghouse. It had all of the urgency and underlying premises necessary for people to process the information in a way that didn’t cause significant cognitive dissonance. Somehow when people were playing the game, they were able to just believe without putting up the mental roadblocks they do with events in real life.
I guess the fractures are getting deep enough that people are starting to understand the direness of our situation.
I still get a ton of hits on my WWO video blog for backyard gardening.
Any chance we could do WWO 2?
June 29, 2008 at 1:12 pm
WriTerGuy
There has been a surge of interest lately in doing WWO 2, and I certainly like the idea. The two biggest problems are (1) finding a sponsor and (2) keeping ahead of real life!
July 1, 2008 at 1:24 pm
PeakProphet
Well, maybe it could be done with more volunteers? I’d volunteer, and I am sure FallingIntoSin and others would too. Or, we could do a variant on it, somehow.
Let me tell you Ken, this is starting to get into the heart of public consciousness. I was just at Home Depot in tiny Bellevue, Tennessee getting some more blood meal fertilizer and a couple of canteloupe for our gigantic garden, and the lady checking me out did the following monologue to me…
“Boy, I should get some pepper plants. For the price of a few peppers at the market, I can get a whole plant and a lot more peppers. Hmmmm… I guess it’s better to get stuff here. It’s all going to be local soon, you know? Gas… I don’t think it’s ever coming back down. People are blaming everyone else, but it’s never coming back down. Nope, never.”
I just shook my head and said “nope.”
It’s like we’re living the game. I am going to go back and look at the gas prices on the various “weeks” and see where we are in game time. I am guessing at least week 2. Any chance we could get a correlation from the aggregate game experience to the real world now? i.e. a set of bullet point events at the various prices of gas?