2 - The Right Time is NOW : Lessons from an unlikely place.

Why right now is a perfect time for YOU to CREATE YOUR OWN FOOD-PRODUCING GARDEN!

There are many reasons why the time for practically everyone to have their own food-producing garden has come. Anyone who care about their health pretty much knows that locally-produced organic vegetables should constitute a large part of our diets. This is so well-accepted by all experts today that the point barely needs any arguing anymore. And it is much simpler to do than you might believe, as numerous websites could show you (for example, look at www.pathtofreedom.com ).

But there is more to it than just health issues: Things are getting worse by the day. Real inflation, that is, what we pay for food and gas and such things, runs at about 30% a year.

In fact, experts believe that we have barely seen the beginning of a global Real Estate, energy and ecological crisis. If you thing the Bubble has already burst, just wait a little. If you think that oil at $100+ a barrel and gas at $4-$5 a gallon is the end of our plights, just wait a little. The only thing that gets more or less rationed now is just rice at wholesale markets, not something very likely to affect most people. Be sure that it won't stop there.

Fact is when the REAL crisis hits, unless you are among the super-privileged, most probably you and the ones you care for are going to be hit so badly, you might even find it difficult to survive it. According to the most pessimistic experts, it's how bad things could get.

Now, what's interesting is that there is a model to refer to about what might happen to us in a not-so-distant future... (Read: After the elections, and particularly during the 2009-2012 period.) Because, what's going to happen to us already happened to other people, and studying what happened to them exactly and how they coped with it is truly very enlightening.

Before we go into the details, here is the conclusion right away: Start your own, personal, organic and sustainable garden. It might save your life, one way or another, if only by helping you stop eating standard foods, which in truth are rarely fit to feed animals. As simple as that!


Artificial bubble economies like the one we experienced in the United States for the past decade or so could be returned to reality by the converging impetus of unaffordable oil, tight money, and rapid climate shift, the way Cuba did. Using Cuba as an example of what may happen to us might feel a bit original, yet, for many reasons, what happened to them after the fall of the Soviet Union might very well foretell what awaits us all... In fact, Cuba's only real revolution has come from the way they adapted to the loss of their Soviet sponsors, and ended farming the urban landscape. Originally, not by choice, but because they had to, even if today, having enjoyed a different way of life for the past 15 years, most people there would probably revolt if they'd be forced to go back to the old ways.

Thinking of Cuba as a potential model can only strike as weird. Cuba was the very model of senseless central planning, industrialization for the sake of itself, lack of choices, etc. The Cuban diet, as a whole, was based on cheap oil, chemical-based agriculture, etc. Once upon a time, Cubans got their oil at hyper-subsidized prices from the Soviet Union. Besides that, food was variations of pork plus rice and beans cooked in pork fat. A nightmare.

Fortunately for Cubans, although they certainly did not see it that way at the time, the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, following years of severe misallocation of talent and resources into weaponry, foreign wars and ill-fated attempts at centralized control.

Cubans suddenly had to face the overnight loss of over half the country's oil, most fertilizers and pesticides - and much of their food. In fact, more than 80% of their imports and exports vanished. Transportation stopped. Blackouts shut down the country's oil-powered electric power grid up to 16 hours every day.

“Try to image an airplane suddenly losing its engines. It was really a crash,” remembered Cuban economist, Jorge Mario. The international development and relief agency, Oxfam reported on the wreckage: “In the cities, buses stopped running, generators stopped producing electricity, factories became silent as graveyards."

Unable to fuel their aging cars, Cubans walked, biked, rode in donkey-drawn carts, motorized two-seat rickshaws, and big semi-trailer trucks called “camels” holding 300 passengers each. Or they caught rides in nearly empty government vehicles with available seats flagged over by yellow-garbed government employees, and carpooled - four people riding in front, four in back.

“Obtaining enough food for the day became the primary activity for many, if not most, Cubans,” Mario added. The average Cuban lost 30 pounds as families and neighborhood grass-roots organization scrambled to identify idle land, cleaned it up, and started planting. “People had to start cultivating vegetables wherever they could,” a tour guide told a documentary crew filming in 2004 to record how Cubans first managed to survive, and then, prospered on half their former oil imports.


Because that's the lesson of the Cuban story. Today, using less than half the oil, and practically no pesticides, herbicides, etc, Cubans are doing much better than they did in the past, because now, their diet is based mainly on locally-produced organic foods.


Hand tools and human grit and ingenuity replaced gas and oil-powered machinery. Worms and compost created productive soil, while drip irrigation conserved water. Local governments were forced into supporting endeavors such as the Foundation for Nature and Humanity, which showed neighborhoods “the possibilities of what they can do on their rooftops and their patios,” recounted Carmen López to a film crew making a documentary about this genuine Cuban revolution. Standing amidst grape vines, potted plants, and compost bins fashioned from tires on the center's rooftop, the urban Permaculture director described how hundreds of urban gardeners have been trained, and entire communities transformed.

Now, if Cubans can do it, why couldn't we? If, forced by circumstances, the average Cuban could produce their own food organically under the worst possible Third-World conditions with the total nonsense of communism as a background, and end immensely benefiting from it in terms of health and quality of life, what's stops us in general, and you and I in particular, of doing the same, under conditions which still remain after all much better? Individual initiative has yet to be outlawed in this country...In Cuba, for a long time, it was.

Plus, state of the art technology could easily allow us to have practically self-maintaining gardens at very small costs.

“Things are changing. It's a local economy,” engineer-turned-farmer Nelson Aguila told the filmmakers. At neighborhood agriculture cooperatives like the “Organipónico de Alamar”, an urban farm, produce market and on-site restaurant complete the cycle of locally grown and distributed produce.

This quiet revolution continues today, with city dwellers enthusiastically growing their own rainbows of brightly colored produce from raised garden beds in parking lots, patios and rooftops. By 2006, 60% the vegetables eaten by more than 2.5 million residents in the Caribbean's biggest city were grown by themselves inside Havana. And in other Cuban towns and cities, urban gardens produced from 80% to more than 100% of their needs. And in fact, this has slowly turned into a quiet political revolution in the background as well, because the local motto is no more obeying government fiat orders from above, but instead has become "Si, se puede", that is "Yes, it can be done", in the best traditions of American do-it-yourselfers.


In fact, the whole story of Cuban do-it-yourself agriculture has become one of turning SCARCITY INTO ABUNDANCE, with the highest quality of foods, the same things that are sold at several dollars a pound at place like Whole Foods markets here, available to anyone for pennies per kilograms there:

“Most of the food is grown where it is eaten - inside cities,” observes Walter Schwarz. Visiting Havana, the co-author with Dorothy Schwarz of "Living Lightly", Schwarz found veggie stalls everywhere inside the city, where “chemical fertilizers and most pesticides are forbidden.”

“Food grows in unlikely spaces between houses,” he wrote, in “huertos” or private urban gardens ranging from a few square meters to more than six acres. Enjoying “elaborate official support,” over one-million huertos are registered in Cuba. The Playa borough's community garden “boasts a hectare [ = 2.5 acres] abundant with parsley, lettuce, spinach and tomatoes,” Schwarz found.

"The secret is in the high productivity of small urban units," Nelso Compagnioni of the Institute for Tropical Agriculture told Schwarz. "Every dollar of produce on a small plot costs 25 cents to produce. As soon as you increase the area you get higher costs - more workers, lower yields, more complex irrigation. And we have no need for transport: customers collect their food on the way home from work."

And this becomes even more true of the smallest possible production unit, what we would call here the Personal Organic and Sustainable Garden. The ratio then would become 10 cents on the dollar. But with food prices inflating like crazy at our local supermarkets, for you, by the time your own garden is in full production, as things go right now, it's very possibly going to end being more like getting food at 2 cents on the dollar...


What's more remarkable even, is that before the “Special Period” of slashed oil imports, organic growing was not part at all of the Cuban culture. Again, the standard diet was a poorer version of American fast food joints offering, and standard food was rice and beans in pork fat plus pork meat, or, for the rich, an imitation of the SAD aka, the "Standard American Diet", the very thing you can buy at your local supermarket or fast-food joint, and which makes us obese and kills us through cancer, cardio-vascular and other degenerative diseases.

But things have come a long way for the average Cuban, who today eats like only millionaires can afford to in the U.S.. Today, eating a wide variety of genuinely organic and GMO-free food is totally integrated to the Cuban way of life. Growing organic makes financial, as well as environmental and health sense, Vilda Figueroa has found. In fact, "organic growing is more economic because you get higher yields with lower costs." To say nothing about what eating wholesome foods does to the people themselves.

“With meat scarce and fresh local vegetables in abundance since 1995, Cubans now eat a healthy, low-fat, nearly vegetarian diet. (If you wonder why you should emulate them, perhaps you should read “The China Syndrome” by T. Colin Campbell). They also have a healthier outdoor lifestyle and walking and bicycling have become much more common,” Schwarz reported. “Before, Cubans didn't eat that many vegetables. Rice and beans and pork meat was the basic diet,” Sanchez chimed in. “At some point necessity taught them, and now they demand [vegetables].” Most would actually refuse to go back to their former standard diet.

In fact, in a society where free medical treatment provides a doctor for every 167 persons, what's most interesting is that this widely-available free healthcare is actually getting used less and less, since the overall health of the population at large has very substantially improved in the past 20 years, with, for example, the rates for obesity, diabetes, cancer and cardio-vascular diseases going down dramatically.

“People in developing countries make up 82% of the world's population and live more on life's edge,” Schwarz adds. But overdeveloped countries “are also vulnerable to shortages in energy. And with the coming onset of peak oil, all countries will have to adapt to the reality of a lower energy world.” The fact that "peak oil" is largely contrived by Big Oil and the interests behind it (see Lindsey Williams videos on YouTube.com, etc, if you aren't yet convinced of that) doesn't change much to gas at $4 or $5 a gallon at the pump, and the price of food inflasting at rates never seen before in the US. And there is a growing consensus that what we have seen so far is just the beginning...

Cubans also moved quickly during the severe oil crisis they experienced and developed small-scale renewable energy: For example, 200-watt solar photovoltaic systems were quickly installed to power households, as well as 2,364 primary schools and medical clinics. Compact solar water heaters, solar-powered water pumps and solar food dryers are also popular. [GNN; sisyphus.gnn.tv Feb 26/06; World Sustainable Agriculture Association Newsletter Fall/96; Resurgence issue 212]

Now, again, if Cubans can do this with no resources to speak of and within the background of the most inefficient economic system ever devised, communism, just imagine what you and I could do, if we put our minds to it! Total household energy independence, Automated and/or Ready-Made Gardens allowing to start eating a wholesome diet at very little costs, and finally, adapting to the fact that there is no need to move around to go to work anymore, etc. (About this, see what people such as Timothy Ferris say, who authored a book about the "4 hour workweek").

Fact is, you could really immensely improve the quality of your life with some very simple and very cost effective steps, the first one being to start enjoying the benefits of your own Personal Organic and Sustainable Garden. However, the longest journey always starts with a first step.

The benefits of eating fresh, organic fruits and vegetables locally-produced, and preferably, produced in your own backyard are so well-known that today, the issue barely needs advocating.

However, does that mean that you are actually eating what you produce? Probably not.

So, what holds you up? When things will become real bad, it will be a little late to start your own garden. It takes over a month to grow a radish, the fastest growing vegetable there is, and a diet based on radishes is probably not going to feel very nourishing. While, if it came to that, you could actually survive on cabbage, potatoes and garden greens -- but those take more like six months to grow... Plus, a little hothouse would be useful too, allowing year-round variety, but you are not going to build and populate one in a day, as whatever you could grow in it would again take months to grow.

You need to start your garden NOW. The 2009-2012 period is going to be the time when you will be glad you did! And even if the coming economic and energy crisis is not as bad as some think it might become, the improvement in your health and quality of life will certainly justify the small effort.

Plus, no one say you actually have to build that garden by yourself. There are many ways to get a garden going without actually having to do the work by yourself, feel free to email me for more information on that.