Growing Your Own Food

After watching BBC News Magazine's feature on allotments I got to thinking about the concept of growing your own food.  For me the idea sounds intriguing, I know for many it would not be entirely practical if at all to grow your own food but perhaps self-sufficiency shouldn't necessarily be the goal, if we all grew just a little bit of any food really then the collective impact would ease the strain placed on our already exhaustive exploitation of resources.

When you think about it, we live in a society of waste.  I would estimate some 90% of us will have access to ground whether that be in the form of a garden or a communal area or what have you, which most of us use for flowers or in my mind the completely useless lawn of grass.  I say completely useless as a lawn essentially gives you nothing of great value, it does not help the planet breathe to the same magnitude several trees would and if anything it costs you money to maintain through the price of the electricity or petrol or other fuel you use to power your lawn mower.  Scrap the lawn and build a small enclosure of greenhouses or plastic equivalents - you can buy these made from recycled plastic bottles.

If we put the ground we currently use for superficial aesthetic displays to some practical use we could make a difference together.  If gardens filled with vegetables or fruits either in the open air or in greenhouses became common place we might even make a profit from our endeavours.  Certainly one would expect the food we grow and consume to amount to a saving in the long term after you discount the initial investment.

I like the idea of being self sufficient and I certainly feel that governments should be more encouraging in this line, there are other areas such as solar power that could prove to be a significant opportunity.  If the millions of homes in the UK were all to have solar panels fitted on their roofs the collective accumulation of energy minus our usage could result in a net gain in power, cutting our dependency on oil, gas, and other non-renewable sources of energy.  If the collective capacity to generate energy exceeded our energy usage as a Country then we could find ourself in a position where we could have a new export - electricity.