How much does eating locally-produced food help the climate problem? What are the other potential environmental and social benefits of eating locally-grown/produced food? Do you have a food garden in your school or at home? If not, do you want one?
Home Grown >
Home Gardening During a Drought?
My school has a garden as a part of the living lab we have on campus. There are chickens, bees, and many different plants that live in the garden. Every Thursday the Living-Lab club makes a soup out of the ingredients from the garden and sells a cup for $1. I have to say it is not the best soup in the world, but you can definitely taste the fresh ingredients!
I would love to start my own garden in my backyard and grow at least some of my produce, but we are in a drought and using water for outdoor plants is now being frowned upon. I know my father goes around the neighborhood and whenever he sees that people have sprinklers on, or just put in a lawn, they should be publicly shammed in his eyes. Is using more water to have a garden worth the public shunning? This brings me to my question: are big company farms more water conservative then a garden in the backyard or even a local farmer? Would using more water at home be better then buying products from a supermarket? I would much rather buy home grown foods because I know right where it came from and I know exact ly what happened to it. At supermarkets, you never really know where your food has been and what happened to it.
Great post Zoe!
my opinion is that there is a huge difference between using water during a drought to (for example) water your lawn and doing what you suggest -- using it to grow food.
For a given plant, it may be a bit more water use for a personal versus a commercial garden, but there are so many advantages of home growing over buying produce from a supermarket grown from far away that I would say that the little excess in water usage coming from your garden is balanced out by the great benefits.
In California, some of the controversy is that a lot of water is used for some crops that are mostly for export out of CA (e.g., almonds) and for some crops that are not even technically food (e.g., wine grapes). I don't think you should feel at all bad about using water for a home grown food garden - even in a drought!
What do other people think?