Freedom Gardens

With Earth Day approaching and all the work I've been doing on a charity project for Earth Day (link will be posted tomorrow), it seems appropriate to share these thoughts.

 

We can help reduce our dependence on imported food, big corporations, and the supply chain by ensuring a bountiful and diverse harvest from sustainable personal and community gardens (link tomorrow to the site I've been working on to help foster this).

 

From an article By Paul Gardener in Grit magazine:

 

Gardens ARE good for our souls. Not merely because they’re therapeutic or because they provide healthy foods or even because they give us a hedge against lean times but rather because, if you look at the big picture, they offer us that thing that we all crave so dearly. They offer that thing that drove our founding fathers to strike out on their own. They offer Freedom.

 

As we faced issues of increasing costs of oil (which by the way is the basis of all of our commercial “inputs” like fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), regular warnings about tainted foods in our stores, and economic pressures that were starting to limit our food buying power, the Dervaes family launched a site called “Freedom Gardens” and with it put a name to a movement that was already beginning to form not only here at home, but world wide.

From the Dervaes family “Freedom Gardens” site:

 

… “freedom” is earned and cannot be taken for granted. In fact, there are forces (lets call them market forces) trying to gain control of the food market for their profit. If they can control the supply of food through hoarding seeds, and the other means of production, we will pay them for their effort with whatever price they wish to charge. On a gut level we know this is wrong… we have the “freedom” to make our own food production choices.”

Join together in a homegrown revolution™ to liberate our lawns and break our dependence on the corporate powers and dwindling fossil fuel supplies, corporate controls, contamination and food miles while creating a sustainable future.

While I give thanks for this amazing planet we live on every day, I like the idea of "Earth Day" to take an extra moment or encourage going above and beyond daily rituals to focus on what more we can do to nurture and protect our home, Mother Earth.