Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community
Back in June the Wall Street Journal is reported on an increasing trend amongst suburban homeowners: growing, instead of buying, food. As the WSJ article reports:
“In Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43% from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17%. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16%. It’s much the same story at Williams Nursery, Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6% even as herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16%. And in Austin, Texas, Great Outdoors reports sales of flowers slightly down, while sales of vegetables have risen 20% over last year.
George Ball, chief executive of seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa., says Burpee’s sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40% this year, twice last year’s growth rate.”
Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles-an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.
A third of our greenhouse gasses are produced from shipping food. Yet not so very long ago in the 1940’s, Americans managed to produce 40% of the food they consumed from Victory gardens in their own back yards.
Today we’ll be talking to Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community. In “Food Not Lawns” (2006), Heather C. Flores argues that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year.
Heather is co-founder of the original Food Not Lawns grassroots gardening project in Eugene, OR, she is a certified permaculture designer, holds a BA degree in ecology, education, and the arts from Goddard College
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http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1APFEWFJOGMB2
ChelseaGreen
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/foodnotlawns#
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