partisan Wrote:I know if i had a garden, id be out there, but i havent, just some metal steps overlooking a pub, i envy people who have the land. It seems the way for the future is to cram as many people into small a place as possible (i would be more happy to have a garden than a flat) just a bit of land, is there enough for all of us?
Lovely little garden jim
The whole land mass of earth is around 36.8 billion acres. Given 7 billion people on earth approximately, that means that there is currently about 5.25 acres per person on earth.
An square acre is 208.7 feet by 208.7 feet. 43,500 square feet.
But there is a catch, that 36.8 billion acres is all of the land, that includes those sandy patches we call deserts and those rocky parts we call mountains. It also includes tundra and other less than arable land like swamps, the out back of Australia (which I understand is hell), the frozen wastes of that continent we call Antarctica.
When it comes to arable land, meaning land that has the right conditions to raise crops on there is
only 7.68 billion acres - currently about one acre of land per human being with a touch left over for the future.
Which isn't a long future, since people tend to be producing more people each day and fewer people are shuffling off this planet to make room.
Currently there is room for each person to have an acre of land. However that would be a life of total isolation, since that wouldn't leave room for things like roads, highways, airports, ship yards...
I would suggest trying a container garden. While I doubt you could raise much in the way of maize/corn, wheat, tomatoes and other large plants, you could raise things like greens (lettuce, spinach and similar leafy greens).
There are now ways to hang tomato vines. I have seen it done with 2 liter bottles with fascinating results: topsy turvy technology:
https://www.topsyturvy.com/
One can successfully espalier tomato vines. I have done that a number of years on a flat wire fence - ]spreading the tomatoes across a 2 dimensional area instead of having it grow into a 3d round bush.
Pole beans can be planted in a regular sized flower pot, as long as the vine is given something to climb up it is happy. A single vine can give lots of beans.
My garden is only 25 x 18 feet, I use compact methods of gardening, succession planting, companion planting and of course I use nearly pure compost to raise plants in.
It could easily fit in a suburbanites back yard. I also have the advantage of a three season growing period, starting early spring through late fall. Some years I do not even get a light frost and can grow some cold weather crops like potato, carrot, radish.
Victory Gardens in the UK used little space and produced abundantly, a few of the methods I use in my garden here were developed during WWII in the Victory Garden.
I understand that some Londonites took to container gardening as a way to supplement their diet, along with planting in craters, having a decent chunk of Hyde Park and other parks converted to community gardens...
I don't know about the UK, but Community gardens in cities here in the USA are successful and there are more and more of them being zoned into existence. If you really, really want a garden, you may want to include neighbors and find a patch of ground to get the town counsel to designate as a community garden.
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Capricorn
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Lots and lots of mulberries. Its my understanding that one can eat them, its just that the tree is so tall I have no idea how to collect them without picking them up off the ground.
