Homesteading Part II: Greener Pastures (2024)

The best name I’ve seen for a back-to-the-land project is “Greener Pastures,” a Los Angeles consultancy I knew in the nineties. Today we have slick websites like Urban Exodus: podcast, Instagram feed, glossy and expensive looking. I prefer the funky, old-fashioned look (more homestead, in my opinion) of Homestead.org, where it’s easy to get lost in stories that range from gorgonzola to turkey manure, from buying land to women bootleggers. And oddly blunt commentary like this:

The most efficient use of alternative energy is to have everyone live in a box in the city with public transportation and centralized resources. Homesteads are not part of that future from a general aspect of planning for climate change. Giant, corporate-owned farms feeding giant, high-density cities—that’s the most efficient use of resources.

There are a startling number of books about urban homesteading: raising chickens, composting, drying food, making pickles, even a composting toilet made from a bucket (seriously! - this appears in a number of books about urban homesteading).

It’s fairytale stuff. I have lived in London and in New York City and done my bit of urban composting and planting, but I would never go so far as to call it homesteading.

But I understand the longing for open skies, dirty hands, simple satisfactions. There is an aridity in modern life that makes us look for something more authentic. Planting, and especially growing something that will then turn up on your plate, is about as simple and authentic as it gets.

Is it efficient to grow your own food? That really depends on how where you live and how much time you have. For most people with full-time jobs, it probably doesn’t make sense. There was a surge of home gardening during the pandemic, of course. The story that had me transfixed was about a couple who were fighting over their pandemic worm bin: one adored it, in spite of the smell and mess, and the other wanted her balcony back (read it).

But just because you’re not trying to be self-sufficient or setting up as an urban farmer, doesn’t mean you can do something meaningful on small scale. It is very unlikely that you will save money growing your own food, and if you record your time in the ledger, your home-grown tomatoes are likely to be expensive. Though perhaps not the current equivalent of The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.

Don’t blame it on the tomato. You can drive through poor neighbors all over the world and see tomatoes growing happily in tin cans and cucumber vines clambering up rough trellises. The cost depends on how fancy you want to be, and how easily tempted you are at the nursery or by the online catalog.

An Australian study showed that community gardens aren’t as productive as we might hope, if our aim is to increase food production in a sustainable way. On the other hand, the pandemic focus on growing your own was not irrational. Food security has been, for all of human history, a major factor in life - and in war. My friend Bill McNeill, author of The Rise of the West, is known for showing how the potato, which came from the Americas, enabled “a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950.” Towards the end of his life, Bill was intrigued to learn that the Chinese had become the world’s largest producer and consumer of potatoes.

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In the 1970 foreword to the Nearings’ book The Good Life, Paul Goodman writes, quoting Thomas Jefferson, that people like the Nearings “cannot be pushed around because they can feed their faces.”

Depending on imported (or long-traveled) food has environmental impact and it is not secure, as we learned during the pandemic. This may not mean the prospect of starvation but of having no salad greens (the UK post-Brexit) or no onions (the UK during World War II). Or no baking yeast (in those early months of the 2020 lockdown).

But does this mean doing it all yourself? The author of Self-Sufficiency John Seymour gave instructions for raising oil crops and pressing your own vegetable oil, but I’ll bet even he didn’t do it.

As with weight loss, there are lots of people with specific programs for new gardeners. There is deep-mulch gardening, straw-bale gardening, square-foot gardening, vacant-plot gardening - all designed for novices and likely to succeed only with experienced gardeners. The square-foot system sounds like a cult, but I’d be glad to hear from anyone who’s tried it.

I’m going to suggest a few baby steps as an alternative. Agriculture goes back millennia but we were hunter gatherers first and some of us really haven’t quite got the hang of planting and harvesting. And I’ll recommend a book worth reading if you are an experienced gardener who wants to consider climate resilient food production.

Starter plants (and seeds)

Gardening is a window into the mystery of life itself. It’s magic. Give it a try, but be realistic - that’s what I keep telling myself as the seed catalogs pile in!

Gardening, perhaps even more than cooking, is a matter of experience and instinct. The best first step is to join a community garden or garden alongside someone who has been gardening for years. Get local advice - every region is different - and observe the gardens in your neighborhood. And start somewhere. Of course it all depends on location, soil and sunlight, and whether you have to worry about plant predators, as I do: rabbits and deer and groundhogs.

My minimalist suggestion for 2024, as long as you have a sunny spot (direct sun at least 6 hours a day) is this: tomatoes and basil in a pot.

Find a large pot or bucket - a 5-gallon plastic utility bucket will do - and some soil to fill it after you use a screwdriver or heated knife to put a few drainage holes in the bottom. Fill with garden soil, or buy a bag of potting soil if you are growing on a porch or balcony, and then one or two tomato plants, and a basil plant. Take them out of the pots, loosen the roots, and plant them in some friendly arrangement. Water well and let them soak up the sun.

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Neither tomatoes or basil have stringent requirements, and they go together well. Keep them watered, give them a little fertilizer if you have some, and with luck and sunshine you’ll have homegrown tomato salads with almost no effort.

(This is something we can’t do here in Massachusetts until May, but you may be in some warmer climate. Tomato and basil plants are sold in many supermarkets when the weather is right.)

Another option, recommended by a lot of garden writers, is to start with salad greens and radishes because they grow quickly and are easy to harvest. If you do, choose varieties you can’t get at the supermarket: beautiful leaf lettuces, obscure Asian greens, gorgeous basils, exotic chillies. Order some seed catalogs, if you’re not already deluged with them, simply to see the extraordinary variety of food plants. (Nichols Garden Nursery, for example, has an excellent range.) The paltry selection in our markets makes it easy to forget the diversity that exists. I read recently that Britain used to produce 5,000 varieties of apple. A couple of my favorite seed sources are listed below, but there are many more.

As for salad greens, I love the approach of British garden writer Joy Larkcom in Salads the Year Round. Maybe not quite the year round where I live. Then again, I was picking land cress just a couple weeks ago. Now that the snow has melted again, I’ll be filling a basket for tonight’s salad - in New England in February.

It’s a mystery cress, by the way. I bought “Land Cress” seed from Nichols 3 years ago and planted it, but never saw anything come up. Now the bank, on another part of the property, is covered with it. Plants move in mysterious ways.

As did this corn stalk, which appeared in the yard of my friends Jan and Chris Nelson. I wonder if their grandsons thought it might be something like Jack’s beanstalk!

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I would be remiss not to tell you about another approach to food production, more hard-core than mind. The Oregon-based author of The Resilient Gardener focuses is food security. She is a traditional agriculturalist who wants to maximize the nourishment from her efforts. Her focus is “the five crops you need to survive” - potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs (duck eggs, not chicken). The Native Americans knew this, obviously. I particularly like her guidance on caring for tools and working efficiently without injuring yourself - topics that don’t get much attention in other guides.