Balcony Garden - Tumblr Posts
My Great Big Joyful Green F-You
Perhaps not so big, actually.
I live in a 600sq Ft apartment. My 5′x9′ balcony (I measured it yesterday when I started my garden planning) is my main growing space, along with four window sills inside during the winter. This is not your ideal growing space.
But I’ma do it anyway.
3 reasons why:
1. Love. I love fresh food, I love the sense of accomplishment I get from a meal prepared from ingredients I’ve grown. I love eating. I love making jams, jellies,and pickles and cracking them open during the dead of winter to remind myself of what’s to come when spring arrives. I love the Earth my Mother. I want to interact with Her, immerse myself in Her. I want to ease Her burdens. I want to revel in Her seasons.
2. I am far too angry at mainstream society, which functions around exploitation. Workers, especially undocumented migrant farmers (many of whom are children) are paid less than minimum wage to harvest the cheep food we find in supermarkets. They work in fields full of toxic chemicals. They have no recourse for labor complaints and many are exploited sexually. If they look for justice, they face deportation. Meanwhile, the land they work on is stripped of nutrients due to mono-culture farming, and fertilizers and chemicals are washed downstream and out to sea, destroying marine ecosystems and fisheries. I am angry that I can’t by clothes I can afford without understanding that someone was most likely paid less than a living wage in a sweatshop across the sea. When we outsource jobs, we also outsource pollution and industrial waste to countries where companies do not have to take responsibility for the damage they do to the health and livelihood of locals.
So I garden. I reuse what I can. I buy second hand. It’s a drop in the ocean but at least doing something keeps me from screaming.
3. Joy. I’m happy when my house smells like ginger-plout jam. I’m happy when I can spend a Saturday afternoon reading a book and drinking mint tea in my garden. I love geeking out over heirloom veggies at my local farmer’s market. And most of all, I’m a cheep bastard who loves the fact that I’ve learned how to stretch food, to grow 10 meals fro 1 bag of sprout seeds, or make amazing vegetable stock from kitchen leftovers.
For me, homesteading is a celebration of my joys, my hobbies, my skills, but also my moral ethos. It is how I walk and talk. It is spiritual. And it is political.
Welcome to Late Frost Year 2.
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