Quote Originally Posted by Trek420 View Post
But trees don't grow on .... well trees. Wilderness is wonderful and we must preserve it, and rural farm land too but the human landscape with trees and people takes people. Gardeners particularly.

Take my condo .... please nearly 500 units in the development, my mutt and I walk around it daily and I can count on the fingers of one hand the units where folks log off and turn off the TV long enough to garden. I'm not blaming TV per se but walk around and you see all these smallish condos with monster flat screens in the front room.

Most are satisfied to have the same agapanthus and ivy (two plants I really dislike) in front that the blow and go gardener guys maintain. It's not the builders fault that there's lawn and ivy.

Not to overgeneralize but the human landscapes we prefer came from generations of people who gardened and a lot of that culture is gone.

See "vegetable gardening" thread for more info on this interest returning
Comment more to Mr. Silver: Part of the scary problem is simply the disappearance of farms and not enough people entering into the farming business to grow our food because of the financial risks involved in relation to the amount of physical effort involved, despite mechanization to help farmers.

It's great that gardening for family sustainability is returning or for low volume production, but not all people are natural gardeners or want to garden much at all.

So 15 years from now, I don't see food flown from faraway locations, disappearing from our grocery stores. Eating local movement is an excellent trend that will have long term sustainability but the reality for certain geographic areas, our climates just will not produce the food in the optimum manner/freshness that we want it for the sheer residential population.

It's a nice thought to think of canning, blanching, freezing and drying local food for winter preservation. But again, how many of us engage in this big time, even when some of us don't have gardens ourselves. It does mean setting aside time and space (if we have it in a tight apartment).

At most, I clean, cut and freeze fresh salmon, we freeze local blueberries, raspberries. That's all that we do. I can't say that I'm thrilled to freeze beans,..for stir fries in winter. It doesn't taste the same at all.

I don't can fruit nor veggies. It's probably more of a cultural disinterest /unfamiliarity that I don't do it plus lack of space for us to store more in our tight storage space area.