| Starting our "Victory Garden" |
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This is a great time to get started on our Garden Journal as we begin preparing our soil and planning our Fall garden. Will it be a "Victory Garden"?
Our Garden Journal can be a rugged, 3 hole notebook or a pretty and flowery journal. It\'s our choice! You can be sure it will be very helpful for the next several years. Do print out my articles and newsletters to add in your journals. They are excellent garden references!
In our journals we want to record our Plant Hardiness Zone, and our first (Fall) and last (Spring) frost dates. (Check the "LINKS" page). This is a good time to draw some sketches on a pad of paper and have pencils and erasers handy. Look online for good seed catalogs to order.....and check the "LINKS". Do consider Heirloom, or open pollinated, seeds.
It\'s good to make a list of the plants and seeds we\'ll want to buy for our planting zone. The Plant Hardiness Zone is based on the hottest and coldest recorded temperatures we live in. This affects our plant purchases and plant success for where we live. We probably won\'t have success if we plant an orange tree in the middle of the desert. And a Joshua tree will not likely grow near the ocean.
We\'ll want to have a particular time almost every day to record the temperature and weather conditions as you\'ll need this for the following years. I check about 7:30 AM and record it for that date. This gives me a good idea of where the weather is headed. If there is snow on the ground or frost, I record that. If it\'s a beautiful sunny day, it\'s recorded, too. Having a handy outdoor thermometer outside a nearby window is ideal. We\'ll discuss this more next time.
On a deeper note - Times are getting very tough for many American\'s. With all the reading and research I do, I do believe they\'ll soon get much tougher. The financial guru\'s are trying desperately to keep the US economy afloat. As we have recently seen, the world economy is also being greatly affected.
America\'s citizens have had many hard times before. Those times I remember most were the 70\'s when government aircraft contracts stopped. Engineering jobs, and those that were affected by the aircraft industry, pretty much dried up. Highly qualified, highly paid engineers took any job they could. Many were flipping burgers at their local McDonald\'s just to keep food on their own tables. Some successfully turned their hobbies into small businesses.
Gas lines were very long as there was a “shortage” of oil then, too, and prices....what else...went up! Now, and as during other hard times in our history, people became more resourceful. Neighbor helped neighbor. Many people removed part of their lawn and planted a vegetable garden. We do what we have to do for our family. There\'s that old saying “When the times get tough, the tough get going.” Does that ring true today? Probably moreso than at any other time in our history.
With so many foods being contaminated with all kinds of disease organisms, with the high cost of food, gas and just about everything else we buy we can\'t afford not to grow some of our food. I don\'t ever want to rely 100% on others for my food, particularly if it comes from another country thousands miles away. In today\'s economy a "Victory Garden" is becoming more appealing.
For a very long time we\'ve been enticed by advertising to buy more, buy now, charge it! We have experienced nearly constant economic growth and a variety of economic "bubbles"! We have relied on others to grow and provide our food. Pesticides and man-made agricultural chemicals, often petroleum based - some very toxic - were invented to make our gardens "successful". Now, a whole generation of people know it no other way. But times are changing rapidly.
As our population ages, we are losing the history, experiences and knowledge of the Great Depression of the late 20\'s and 30\'s, and World War II in the 40\'s. History is cyclical. And knowing our history is critical to making wise decisions today. We can learn valuable lessons from the past.
Then, the world had experienced many years of economic hardships. People were being asked to give up more. There were some food shortages of canned foods in World War II era. Everyone here at home did their part to aide in the war effort. We were a very patriotic nation. Yet nearly 20 million Americans planted a "Victory Garden" to see them through hard times. During that time the Victory Gardens produced almost 40% of all that was consumed.
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