A recent essay by Mike Riggs in the Washington Post caught my eye. In it the author describes his family’s move from Philadelphia to a few acres in North Carolina, a move which begets a mania for self-sufficiency. He starts gardening, and things go from bad to worse: raised beds and blueberries, a quarter mile of deer fencing, a fancy greenhouse with a temperature controlled ventilation system.
Mostly Riggs wants you to know that homesteading isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you think you’re just going to roll up to a bit of land, toss some tomato seeds around, and find yourself effortlessly creating a bounty, think again. There are bugs and diseases, stressful malfunctions, succession plantings and time sensitive harvests. Deer jump the deer fence, possums mess with the compost, squirrels and groundhogs do what squirrels and groundhogs do.
It’s a great essay, brisk and funny and relatable to anyone who has gardened, and even more relatable to anyone who has planned out the perfect growing season on a blustery February afternoon with the seed catalogue in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, only to find, come June, that sixteen different varieties of lettuce might have been overdoing it. But I think Riggs made a considerably greater error than an overly ambitious seed order, one that guaranteed, if not failure, then quite a lot of pain.
The problem is that all that stuff — the raised beds, the blueberries, the fencing, the fancy greenhouse — came with the property. He and his wife purchased a turnkey homestead. I well understand how this would seem ideal, but it’s like getting into boating by buying a yacht without spending enough time in a canoe to find out if you actually enjoy the water.
And then there’s the cost, detailed when the piece dips into the time-honored $64 tomato genre. The book by that name, published about twenty years ago, documents all the absurd costs and effort that go into having a perfect garden, and it is the fullest example of the form. But the earliest case I know of appears in E. B. White’s essay Security, in which he tallies up the expense of raising a turkey and arrives at the improbable sum of $402.85, and this in 1938. It’s a joke, mostly, in that he attributes things like chimney repairs and a new furnace to the hapless bird, as well as the notional value of the misspent hours taken up with puttering, setting up a skunk trap, and so on.
Riggs mostly plays it straight, listing $1000 dollars for new raised beds, $165 for greenhouse ventilation motors, and another $1000 for irrigation. He does mention the absurdity of wasting hours shelling peas, which can be purchased, conveniently shell-less, for $1.20 per pound at the local Walmart, in an implicit echo of White’s profligate skunk trapping.
By purchasing a property with established methods of production, both systems like raised beds, crazy amounts of deer fencing, and a greenhouse, which will always be expensive to operate, and systems like perennial plantings, which will always be demanding on time, Riggs locked himself into a very particular vision of homesteading, one requiring lots of work and little regard for cost.
At the end of the piece he is happily buying most of his food from box stores and the farmers’ market, while growing some tomatoes, peppers, watermelon, and other veggies. He’s even planted concord grapes, a perennial, and plans on building a trellis for the vines to climb on. While I might quibble with a few of his arguments for embracing the modern food system, the points that self-sufficiency is an unrealistic goal and that you should grow what you enjoy growing are spot on. If Riggs had started with bare dirt and slowly added to it, he might have reached the same conclusion with a bit less heartbreak.
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A few more practical notes for anyone dipping their toes into gardening and homesteading:
- Raised beds are great for a small, tidy backyard garden, but they are not a good choice for producing a ton of veggies. I’m not aware of a single market gardener who uses raised beds.
- As I detailed in a recent post, you need to find systems that work for you. One danger of buying a fully established homestead is that it locks you into someone else’s vision and budget.
- While it’s possible to decrease reliance on the just-in-time food system, true self-sufficiency is not a realistic goal. I live on a farm with a bunch of livestock, a huge garden, and a root cellar, and I am nowhere near self-sufficient. Even though I produce far more calories than I’d need to survive, all of those calories have inputs derived from the complex and interconnected economy we are all a part of. Also, I like drinking good coffee, and I’m not giving it up.
- Before committing to expensive infrastructure like a greenhouse, ask yourself if you absolutely love the activity it will facilitate, like starting your own plants. If you do, go for it. If you don’t, find a commercial greenhouse that will do your starts for you. I was in the process of planting a cider orchard near the house, but then I realized I don’t like hard cider that much, and I can always find apples around if I do want to make a batch.