Food & Water

The most amazing aspect of it, and I don’t know why, is that this “wild” lettuce is ready to eat before the lettuce that I plant early in the cold frame, coddled with compost and protected with a plastic cover on cold nights. The “wild” lettuce grows faster. If I had any brains, I would quit the cold-frame lettuce, but so far I just don’t have enough faith in nature to do it.

Michael Pollan: Deep agriculture (talk)
Let them eat cash: Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?
Ten things you can do to fight world hunger
The 21st century’s bleak harvest

You are surrounded by food. You probably have nettles in your area, but even if you don’t, maybe you have daisies, dandelions, clover, sorrel, brambles, berries, goosefoot, cowslips and dozens of other plants. Maybe you have local hazels, cobnuts and walnuts – even acorns can be made edible. There are local animals to eat, local sources of water, ways to warm up or keep cool. How do I know this? Because people lived for the first 99 percent of humanity’s history, almost everywhere on Earth – in deserts, on ice caps, and certainly in the forests and fields that are now America and Europe — when all food, all water, all shelter, was wild.

Translation into Spanish of the first chapter from the Robert Hart’s classic Forest Gardening. This chapter presents a vision of how the whole economy can be based on forest gardens

The carbon police frown on my practice of burning the asparagus bed. I am contributing to global warming, they say. Never mind all those jets flying high overhead, each of whose engines contributes more carbon emission in one minute than my burning asparagus patch does in a couple thousand years. Those very important people riding around in jetliners are doing the Lord’s work (like dropping bombs on people), while I am just a heathen dancing in this lovely May weather while I scarf down fresh asparagus.