Some time back I read an eye opening book called "Gardening When it Counts: How to Grow food in Hard Times". The author shows that current intensive growing methods do not work when fertilizer and water are hard to come by. He relays heirloom information that will be vital in the coming years and I highly recommend it.

See this article by the author, Steve Solomon in Mother Earth News to get a taste of his invaluable knowledge.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2006-06-01/A-Better-Way...
-----------------------------------
A while back a commune in North Carolina was featured in a multi-page article in the New York Times. They had plenty of land, water and labor but could not grow all of their own food. They needed to buy grains. They've been trying for a long time but can't make it work.
------------------------------------
I ran across something a while back called "the myth of the self sufficient homestead". Essentially, colonial homesteaders where modified hunter / gathers who supplied some of their food with farming / gardening.
------------------------------------
Thoughts of this topic arose recently from 2 posts on my favorite news source, that being www.energybulletin.net.
Both articles are below...

http://www.energybulletin.net/45135.html
Published on Friday, May 30, 2008 by Common Dreams

It will take a lot more than gardening to fix our food system
By Stan Cox

I didn’t mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Adding my small voice to those urging Americans replace their lawns with food plants wasn’t, in itself, a bad idea. But now that food shortages and high costs are in the headlines, too many people are getting the idea that the solution to America’s and the world’s food problems is for all of us in cities and suburbia to grow our own. It’s not.

Don’t get me wrong: Growing food just outside your front or back door is an extraordinarily good idea, and if it’s done without soil erosion or toxic chemicals, I can think of no downside. Edible landscaping can look good, and it saves money on groceries; it’s a direct provocation to the toxic lawn culture; gardening is quieter and less polluting than running a power mower or other contraption; the harvest provides a substitute for industrially grown produce raised and picked by underpaid, oversprayed workers; and tending a garden takes a lot of time, time that might otherwise be spent in a supermarket or shopping mall.

So it was in 2005 that our family volunteered our front lawn to be converted into the first in a now-expanding chain of “Edible Estates“, the brainchild of Los Angeles architect/artist Fritz Haeg. We already had a backyard garden, but growing food in the front yard (which, as Haeg himself points out, is a reincarnation of a very old idea) has been a wholly different, equally positive experience.

Our perennials and annuals are thriving, we’ve gotten a lot of publicity, and I’ve been talking about the project for almost three years. Yet neither of our gardens, front or back, can stand up to the looming agricultural crisis. Good food’s most well-read advocate, Michael Pollan, has written that growing a garden is worth doing even though it can make only a tiny contribution to curbing carbon-dioxide emissions. He might have added that growing food is worth it even if it does very little to revive the nation’s food system.

World cropland: the pie is mostly crust

The edible-landscaping trend is catching on across the country, and with food prices rising, it has taking sadly predictable turns. A Boulder, Colo. entrepreneur, for example, has tilled up his and several of his neighbors’ yards and started an erosion-prone, for-profit vegetable-farming operation. It will supplement his income, but it won’t make a nick in the food crisis.

That’s because the mainstays of home gardening — vegetables and fruits — are not the foundation of the human diet or of world agriculture. Each of those two food types occupies only about 4 percent of global agricultural land (and a smaller percentage in this country), compared with 75 percent of world cropland devoted to grains and oilseeds. Their respective portions of the human diet are similar.

Suppose that half of the land on every one-acre-or-smaller urban/suburban home lot in the entire nation were devoted to food-growing. That would amount to a little over 5 million acres (pdf) sown to food plants, covering most of the space on each lot that’s not already covered by the house, a deck, a patio, or a driveway. (And in many places it couldn’t be done without cutting down shade trees and planting on unsuitably steep slopes).

That theoretical 5 million acres of potential home cropland compares with about 7 million acres of America’s commercial cropland currently in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total farmland. The urban and suburban area to be brought into production would not approach the number of healthy acres of native grasses and other plants that are slated to be plowed up and sickened to make way for yet more corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains under the newly passed federal Farm Bill.

A nationwide grow-your-own wave would send good vibes through society, ripples that could be greatly amplified by community and apartment-block gardening. But front- and backyard food, even if everyone grew it, would not cover the country’s produce needs, much less displace our huge volume of fresh-food imports.

We could, instead, plant every yard to wheat, corn, or soybeans, which would account only for a little over two percent of the US land sown to those crops. Other policies, like dispensing with grain-fed meat and fuel ethanol, would free up far more grain-belt land than that.

Not even a poke in the eye

I’ve played a part in the promotion of domestic food-growing, and I now I seem to hear daily from people who believe that it’s the best alternative to industrial agriculture (as in, “I’ll show Monsanto and Wal-Mart that I don’t need their food!”). Even though most prominent home-lot food efforts, like the “100-Foot Diet Challenge“, also try to draw attention to bigger issues, the wider message can get lost in the excitement. Whatever its benefits, replacing your lawn with food plants will not give Big Agribusiness the big poke in the eye that it needs, nor will it save the agricultural landscapes of the nation or world.

To do that, the big-commodity market must be not just modified but overthrown. Until then, most of that two-thirds or more of the human calorie and protein intake that comes from grains and oilseeds (directly in most of the world or among Western vegetarians, largely via animal products for others in this country) will continue to be served up by a dirty, cruel, unfair, broken system.

Essential for providing vitamins, minerals, and other compounds, a highly varied diet is important, and home gardens around the world help provide such a diet. But with a world population now approaching seven billion people and most good cropland already in use, only rice, wheat, corn, beans, and other grain crops are productive and durable enough to provide the dietary foundation of calories and protein.

Grains made up about the same portion of the ancient Greek diet as they do of ours. We’ve been stuck with grains for 10,000 years, and our dependence won’t be broken any time soon.

The United States could emulate Argentina and a handful of other countries and by raising cattle that are totally grass-fed instead of grain-fed and thereby consuming less corn and soybean meal. But most of the world is utterly dependent on grains. The desperate people we saw on the evening news earlier this year, filling the streets in dozens of countries, were calling for bread or rice, not cucumbers and pomegranates.

Capitalism: It doesn’t go well with food

Humanity’s attachment to cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds has acquired a much harder edge in the industrial era, but as a base for political and economic power, the staple grains have always been unsurpassed. Because they hold calories and nutrients in a dense package that can be easily stored for long periods and transported, the more fortunate members of ancient societies could accumulate surpluses. Those surpluses are recognized by the majority of scholars as necessary to the birth of market economies, which allowed the prosperous to exercise control over society’s have-nots. Eventually, states used control over grains to exert political power over entire populations.

Few foods could have filled that role. Noting that before grain agriculture came along, ancient Egyptians might have gathered a surplus of various foods from nature, most of them highly perishable, economic historian Robert Allen once wrote, “If all a tax collector could get from foragers was a load of waterlilies that would wilt by next morning, what was the point of having them?” The Pharaohs managed to exert control over the area’s population only after people started farming wheat and barley.

The even bigger problem with grains — which are short-lived annual plants, grown largely in monoculture — is that they supplanted the diverse, perennial plant ecosystems that covered the earth before the dawn of agriculture. We’ve been living with the resulting soil erosion and water pollution ever since.

Then, when grains became fully commodified a couple of centuries ago, things really started to go downhill. In discussing his new book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Raj Patel cited India as an example: “The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn’t afford food, they didn’t get to eat, and if they couldn’t buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food.”

Indeed, if capitalism were a wine, it would be a wine that doesn’t go well with any type of food.

Most food today is produced not as an end in itself but as a by-product of a global economy with the singular goal of turning maximum profit. That is a dysfunctional arrangement, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics explained almost 40 years ago in his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process: “So vital is the dependence of terrestrial life on the energy received from the sun that the cyclic rhythm in which this energy reaches each region on the earth has gradually built itself through natural selection into the reproductive pattern of almost every species, vegetal or animal … Yet the general tenor among economists has been to deny any substantial difference between the structures of agricultural and industrial productive activities.”

Industrial or commercial output can be increased by building more capacity, stepping up the consumption of inputs, taking on more workers, and pushing workers harder and for longer hours. Farming, by contrast, is inevitably bound by the calendar - by month-to-month variation in the capacity of soil and sunlight to support the growth of plants. It depends fundamentally on the productivity and the habits of non-human biological organisms over which humans can exert control only up to a point.

That clearly isn’t the ideal pattern for efficient wealth generation, so the past century has seen relentless efforts to mold agriculture into the factory model as closely as possible and, where that can’t be done, to graft more easily regimented industries — farm machinery, fertilizers, chemicals, food processing, the restaurant industry, packaging, advertising — onto an agricultural rootstock. In the US, the dollar outputs of those dependent industries are growing at two to four times the rate of agriculture’s own dollar output, putting ever-greater demands on the soil.

With a wholesale shift toward mechanization of US agriculture, 75 percent of economic output now comes from fewer than 7 percent of farms; furthermore, there has been a steep rise in the proportion of farms owned by investors living in distant cities (some of them perhaps avid urban gardeners).

Because, as Georgescu-Roegen showed, there’s a fundamental difference between the farm and the factory, the well-used term “factory farming” represents more an aspiration than an accomplished fact. Nevertheless, agribusiness’s attempts to defy natural rhythms and achieve industrial efficiency have been ecologically devastating. The biofuel craze, encouraged by subsidies that continue in the new Farm Bill, compounds the problem.

“We must cultivate our garden,” and …

To repair the broken system that supplies the bulk of the nation’s diet will require Americans to step out of the garden and into the public arena. Beyond working to get a better Farm Bill passed five years from now, we have to work together to break the political choke-hold that agribusiness has on federal and state governments.

With land and wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (and with more prisoners than farmers in today’s America) we have actually reached a point at which land reform is as necessary here as it is in any nation of Latin America or Asia. Only when we get more people back on the land, working to feed people and not Monsanto, will the system have a chance to work. Most home gardeners know that the root of the problem is political, but the agricultural establishment would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.

Ironically, it’s that great troublemaker Voltaire who has too often been trotted out (and too often misquoted) as an advocate of withdrawing from the tumult of society, into tending one’s own property. Voltaire was indeed a gardener, and he did end his most famous novel by having Candide, after surviving so many far-flung hazards, utter those famous words to his fellow wanderer Dr. Pangloss: “We must cultivate our garden.”

However, with the publication of Candide in 1759, Voltaire entered the most politically active part of his life, as he “went on to a series of confrontations with the consequences of human cruelty that, two hundred-odd years later, remain stirring in their courage and perseverance,” in the words of Adam Gopnik.

If Voltaire could find the time for both gardening and radical political action, then all of us can do it.

Stan Cox is a senior scientist at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas and author of the newly published Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine (Pluto Press, 2008).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AND THE OTHER ARTICLE...

http://www.energybulletin.net/45239.html
Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 by Energy Bulletin

A doomer's garden
By Zachary Nowak

Now that oil is up over $130 a barrel and the subprime debacle is making everyone think that there may just be a Big Problem in the future, I would like to reopen the discussion on the menu du jour, post-Peak. Tractor trailers may not be able to bring in our Krispie Flakes and California oranges, and we may have to “make other arrangements,” as James Howard Kunstler often says, to feed ourselves. I am worried with the frequency that I see “gardens” as a solution to a breakdown in the food supply, and I would like to disabuse the peaknik crowd of this dangerous illusion.

“If there’s a problem with the food supply, I’ll just garden,” you say! If the Peak comes and causes disruptions in the food supply, your Hubbert Victory garden will see you through the winter months. I’m sure most of us love to picture ourselves putting up forty quarts of tomatoes and salting beans for the winter in a large beige crock. With your green thumb and Mason jars you’ll can enough to last until next year’s first corn comes in.

This is a nice fantasy, but I would ask the more serious to do a simple survey. Each of us likely has a friend who has a fairly large garden. Ask him or her what percentage of their family’s yearly food intake comes from the garden – I would be astounded if any say more than two percent. Annual gardening, like agriculture, takes an enormous input of energy for the return you get, and that is assuming you are good at it.

Are you good at it? How much do you know about gardening? To have a truly successful large garden you need to eliminate as many of the risks as possible. Unfortunately, the risks are myriad: poor germination, premature planting (or a late frost), garden pests (from aphids to groundhogs), too much rain, too little water, and so on. Taking each of these individually, we can see that annual gardening has a lot of luck involved in it. A good gardener buys high-quality seeds, uses cold frames to start plants before the last frost, knows the growing periods of each vegetable well, is prepared for the various “enemies” of his/her plants, and spends hours watering if need be.

What happens, though, if it doesn’t work out well? If gardening is your hobby, it’s not a problem. But in a post-Peak situation where food is tight, it just may be. Ask yourself what you know about gardening, and whether that is enough to risk your life on the tomatoes coming in and rows of corn ripening. Horticulture alone is not a valid answer unless you are already an expert, and even then it is tough. I am emphatically not saying that you should not garden – a large garden will be essential – but simply that it is dangerous to depend on gardening alone.

What then, is the answer? Lowering your inputs, increasing your outputs, and redundancy. In other words, get more food from plants that don’t require such babying, and don’t rely on just a few main crops. The key is diversification with hardier, low-maintenance crops: perennial vegetables, bush- and vine-fruits, and trees. If you’re a gardener you likely already have the two most common perennial vegetables, asparagus and rhubarb (the latter we often eat as a fruit, with strawberries), but don’t limit yourself to these! There are a number of perennial onions that come up every year without the hassle of planting sets, tubers like Jerusalem artichokes that are easy to the point of being pesky, and even old-fashioned favourites like lovage. Fruits like currants and gooseberries are easy to propagate and can, and you can even have kiwi fruit growing along your fence (it’s a smaller, hardier relative than the kiwi in the grocery stores). For trees, go beyond apples and peaches to hazelnuts, quinces, and persimmon trees. All have fewer pests than their more common cousins and produce fruit and nuts earlier and more steadily.

Of course a bountiful harvest just begs more questions, like are there other methods of preservation that are less energy-intensive than canning? This is an optimistic problem, one you should be happy to face. A much more immediate problem is feeding yourself in an uncertain world. Don’t get me wrong, I will still have an annual garden long after Hubbert’s Peak – I can’t be without tomato sauce or fresh corn – but having tried my hand at gardening, I’ve realized that it’s a gamble as far as what you get, and not one most people should make. Peakniks with green thumbs, go buy some currant bushes!

Zachary Nowak splits his time between central Italy and upstate New York. A self-described doomer, he’s just put out a new book, Crash Course: Preparing For Peak Oil (www.preparingforpeakoil.com). The book lays out a holistic plan for post-Peak life, and records his seven-year attempt to become more self-sufficient…and get the corn before the raccoons!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two chapters of Zachary's book can be viewed online at his website

For more on the limitations of gardening, see It will take a lot more than gardening to fix our food system by Stan Cox at Common Dreams.

-BA

Contributor SP adds:
I think this is true of most backyard gardens I've ever seen.