Eye on the Environment: Act to counter the uncertainty: Grow some food

By Lorraine Rubin
Guest writer
Sunday, February 15, 2009

Food gardening is hot right now. Fingernails haven't seen this much dirt in years.

Recent surveys by the National Gardening and Garden Writers associations report significant increases in consumer spending on vegetable gardening. In our own county, managers of community gardens report greater interest in rental of garden plots, and we have groups throwing free garden installation parties to help neighbors get started growing food.

Pick your reason: high food costs, job losses, hunger, concerns about food quality, climate change or dwindling energy supplies. It adds up to insecurity. Food insecurity.

Applications for food stamps, just one measure of this insecurity, are soaring in Ventura County and the nation, with more than 10 percent of the U.S. population now receiving them.

Growing some food, thankfully, is an action within reach for many of us that can return a sense of security.

As Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," stated in a New York Times essay last spring, "Measured against the problem we face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it's one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind."

Growing food in tough times is, of course, nothing new. During World War II, victory gardens supplied up to 40 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables Americans consumed. There are now campaigns sprouting up all over the country urging a revival of the victory garden movement.

Rose Hayden-Smith, acting director of the Ventura County Cooperative Extension office and a practicing U.S. historian, is a nationally recognized leader in this effort. Thanks to a fellowship from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Hayden-Smith has been crisscrossing the nation giving speeches, granting interviews and blogging like crazy to push the message that our country needs to invest, once again, in local gardening. Victory gardens, as she describes in one of her blogs, can do much to bring a troubled nation together.

"The victory gardens of World War I and World War II — and the garden efforts of the Great Depression — helped Americans successfully negotiate hard times. These gardens helped the family budget, improved dietary practices, reduced the food mile and saved fuel, enabled America to export more food to our allies, beautified communities, enabled every American to contribute to a national effort and helped bridge social, ethnic, class and cultural differences during a time when cooperation was widely needed," she writes. "Gardens were an expression of solidarity, of patriotism and shared sacrifice. They were found everywhere ... schools, homes and throughout public spaces in communities all over the nation. No gardening effort was too small. Every effort counted. Americans did their bit. And it mattered."

Just this month, Hayden-Smith wrote a letter to the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture suggesting a victory garden conference be convened in Washington, D.C., this spring, using as a model the National War Garden Defense Conference held there in 1941, less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Such a conference could outline how a national victory garden program could once again offer food security to Americans by supporting edible gardens in our schools, homes, workplaces and communities.

While we wait for government leadership, however, there is nothing stopping us from growing some food.

You couldn't ask for a better place for a food garden. The climate and soils that make Ventura County such a prolific agricultural county can make for a very productive garden. And because we are an agricultural county, we have considerable expertise here: the academic farm advisers who help citrus growers with pests or organic farmers with soil building, for example, are the same ones who instruct our county's Master Gardener volunteers, who then teach gardening in the community. Our colleges, cities and gardening clubs offer gardening classes and there are numerous community gardens that have plots available for rent.

Here are some resources that can help you get started:

- For questions about gardening, contact the Master Gardeners at 645-1455 or mgventura@ucdavis.edu. Answering your questions is their job.

- For a copy of the Ventura County Gardening Resources handout, which includes classes, clubs and community gardens, visit http://ceventura.ucdavis.edu/mg_menu or call the Ventura County Cooperative Extension at 645-1451.

- To read more about victory gardens, go to http://groups.ucanr.org/victorygrower.

- To watch the Grow Food Party install a garden in Ojai, go to http://www.ojaitv.com/2009/01/grow-food-garden-party.

— Lorraine Rubin is a master composter and volunteer with the Ventura County Farm Advisor's Office. Representatives of government or nonprofit agencies who want to submit articles on environmental topics for this column should contact David Goldstein at 658-4312 or david.goldstein@ventura.org.


© 2009 Ventura County Star

I Twitter for you!

Too old/busy/jaded to 'social network,' but still want to seem hip? Call now!

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Are you a Net neophyte? Very, very late bloomer? Profoundly paranoid about the totally CIA-monitored Interweb?

Do you still prefer to get your news and information from disposable printed matter made from poor ol' trees because you believe all high-tech gizmos are a total soul-sucking waste of time except maybe for your George Foreman grill and the old FM radio in the truck? Read on, friend.

 

Speaking of friends, do you have any? Do you have enough? How do you know? Are you sick of hearing about the "social networking" phenomenon, all those Web 2.0 companies with geeky-sounding names like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and Tumblr and LookSpaceBookFeedPlaceWad, sites where 'friends' flock together like flies to cow eyelids and everyone's young and cute and funny and jacked-in to the cultural zeitgeist, but you have no idea what it all means or why you're supposed to care because you have, you know, a real life, yet you still have this nagging feeling that a potentially rich, exciting aspect of the culture is passing you by like an ice cream truck in summer?

 

Worry no longer, dear one. Salvation is at hand.

 

Allow me introduce you to my groundbreaking new company, Geekamania.com. I created it to meet the needs of smart but also slightly bewildered, overwhelmed, angry, out-of-touch, nervous or otherwise increasingly irrelevant people, just like you!

The concept is very simple. Who needs Facebook and MySpace and the like? You do! But who the hell has time for such pathetic digital hoo-ha nonsense when there's dishes to be washed and gardening to be done and kids to be driven around and thorny little roses to be stopped at and smelled? No one!

 

That's where Geekamania comes in. Let us do the annoying but necessary-evil social networking crapola for you! For a small monthly fee, we'll keep you connected and relevant, even vaguely respectable/marginally noticeable to the jaded, spiteful, easily distracted ADHD youth of today, whether you think you want to be or not. It couldn't be easier!

Here's how it works: After we receive your credit card info, you fill out a small mountain of lengthy, deeply personal, oddly phrased questionnaires about, well, every aspect of your life. Personal tastes, travel experiences, sexual hang-ups, irrational fears, childhood traumas, recent car troubles, gross bodily functions, marriage-destroying sports obsessions, weight issues, sexual fantasies about Obama, nightmares and medications and lingering, acidic resentments over old boyfriends, along with your seething hatred of rude cell phone users and people who eat stinky tuna on the bus.

 

And don't forget the photos! We want them all: you on a rope swing, you scarfing pizza with 10 very pale people from your softball team, you looking all sullen and resentful at your friend's wedding, you with horrible red-eye, a blurry shot of your toes (artsy!), you and your best bro posing with Tera Patrick at the AVN Awards and grinning like monkeys, the works.

 

Don't forget to include lots of snapshots of your cats, your kids, your golfing buddies, your prom, that one shot of you from the office Christmas party where Darren from Accounting has his arm draped around you and is clearly pawing at your breast and no one can believe you're actually dating that alcoholic loser.

 

We take it from there. We design, set up and maintain as many hip social networking pages as you want, spinning off the information you provided but also totally rearranging it and making it up at will, all to make you sound exactly as cute/clever/sexy/boring/lonely/unstable (you choose) as you've always dreamed. You don't have to do a thing!

 

How do you know it's working? That's easy. We send you, every month, a breakdown of all the activity on your various sites. The best messages, meanest postings, weirdest comments, the most embarrassing photos of your supposedly hot-looking connections -- and, most importantly, the names and personal stats of all the new "friends" we've earned for you, all broken down into nice pie charts and bar graphs and color-coded thingamabobs. Just like USA Today, only even less useful.

 

What should you do with all this amazing information? How the hell should we know? Viva la revolución!

Here's just a few of the recent Facebook/Twitter status updates we created for our satisfied customers:

"Susan is eating banana pancakes and watching the rain."

 

"Tom is slamming some cold beerz and organizing a fantasy football league instead of feeding the baby. Don't tell wifey!"

 

"Erin just noticed a boo-boo in her knitting and now has to undo four hours of work. Grr!"

 

"Jen got up at 7am to do laundry only to find the machine is busted and then she broke a nail hitting it with her hand. God my life sukks!!"

"Tina is STILL looking for love but finding it in all the wrong places LOL!!!"

 

"Jay is eating Thai food with Morgan and watching a 'Mad Men' marathon. So gud!"

 

"LouAnn is sad."

 

It's just that simple.

 

By employing a small army of 5,024 recently laid-off journalists from all major newspapers around the nation, we guarantee basic grammatical accuracy, reasonably clever innuendo, occasional smart-alecky tones and sporadic fact-checking, all wrapped in a professional ability to cull appealing factoids from your otherwise dreary life, just so random people you barely know or haven't seen/cared about in 10 years might envy your every waking moment. How cool is that?

 

Still not convinced? Still claim you really don't care about any of this Web 2.0 crap because you have a "real" life to lead? That's OK. We know you're lying.

Of course you care. Look, all the kids are doing it. Hell, even old folks and parents are on Facebook these days, not to mention all your co-workers and former lovers, and didn't I just see a grainy cell phone pic of some surfer dude sucking a Jell-O shot from your ex-wife's thigh at the Hard Rock in Cabo? Dude, it was totally her. I just saw it in my Facebook news feed. Whoa.

 

Look, we know how it is. Most days, it's all you can do to walk upright and shove food in your mouth and into the gaping maws of your various demons, much less bother with keeping up with the insufferable digital revolution.

 

Let us take the anxiety out of keeping you remotely relevant to the culture before you die all alone in a cold garage somewhere. Let us give you the vibrant, multifaceted life you always wanted but never had the time to invent, spell-check, cross-post, drunkenly update and freak out over for yourself.

 

Remember our slogan: "Geekamania: Because you don't have time for this sh-t."

 

 

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Thoughts about this column? E-mail Mark.