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Hobby farming ------------- First off, greetings to ja[1] and oms[2], relative newcomers to the phlogosphere. I feel like there has been a small surge in new gopher holes on SDF lately, which is great! Recently tfurrows wrote a nice long post[3] about, among other things, his desire to attempt some kind of modern subsistence farming. Responding to that will probably the main focus of this post, but I wanted to touch on something else first. Part of tfurrows' post was an expression of frustration at how various government impositions make it impossible or impractical to farm on land that you allegedly own. This echos sentiment he expressed in a yet earlier post[4] about how his desire to live in a yurt is frustrated by things like building codes, sanitation codes etc. in some US states basically ruling out the possibility of living in the structure of your choice. I completely get this frustration. Sometimes I think one of the greatest injustices modern society imposes upon those living within it is the near total lack of options for voluntarily and gracefully exiting it, even partially or temporarily. Living in a boat seems to be one of the very few lifestyels which are unusual-but-usual-enough that it is catered to by society at large, to some extent. I have never looked into the details closely, but casual reading of stuff online seems to suggest that if you own a boat you can do your own wiring and plumbing on that boat, even if you live on it, without having to worry an awful lot about qualifications or code compliance. If you stuff something up and make your life unpleasant, that's your problem. It's odd that this kind of life is quite okay at sea but not at all on land. Anyway, this is supposed to be about the idea of modern day individual farming. Not farming on a massive scale with the sole purpose of selling off everything you grow to get money to buy food to eat, and not the old-fashioned image of a peasant working their hands to the bone to grow just enough food to scrape by without starving, but something in between where you farm just to provide your own immediate food requirements, or perhaps a little in excess of that so you can trade with other people in your community. I have read, and certainly it seems plausible, that with today's much improved understanding of agricultural science and the availability of better tools, this does not have to be a life of unrelenting physical labour and inadequate nutrition, but can be vaguely comfortable. This possibility is of course of great interest to me, given my general interest in a dramatically "down shifted" lifestyle. Back in New Zealand I experimented very casually with growing vegetables in my back yard, and had some successes, but also some failures. I never quite put the time or effort into it that is realistically required to have much hope at success. I would like to try harder, but, well, Finland, even in the South, is not exactly Phoenix, Arizona. Gardening seems pretty much out of the question for a good chunk of the year, although maybe this is pessimistic. Driving around Iceland a few years ago,, I remember being amazed at how many greenhouses there were scattered around the place, and I seem to remember being told that the country provided a lot (all?) of its own vegetables. Then again, electricity is dirt cheap there, which possibly helps with that kind of operation. Anyway, I'm also not in a situation where I can build a greenhouse in my backyard. But not far away from my home at all there is a patch of land alongside a river where, in the summer months, you can rent a small bit of garden space for very reasonable prices, and my wife and I are pretty keen to give this a try this year. I'll try to take it a bit more seriously this time, both in terms of how much actual work I put into watering, weeding, pest control etc. on a daily basis, and in terms of actually learning about what I should plant and how in order to maximise yield. [1] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/ja/ [2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/oms/ [3] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2018/MAR2018/alz_jobSatisfaction.txt [4] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2018/FEB2018/aml_yurtItUp.txt