To hell with productivity

Enough is quite simply enough

January 09, 2023

Welcome to my most clickbait title yet. Surely, we want our gardens to be as productive as possible? Yes, but, it depends.

The problem is with how we define productivity. I worked on a market garden for a few months, a lovely vegan and pretty much organic outfit run by dedicated owners. It was relentless outdoor factory work: sow-plant-weed-water-harvest-repeat. They had to be productive to make the books balance.

I tried introducing perennial vegetables but there’s no way they would fit with commercial pressures. “I know what I like and I want what I know” is the punter’s view and the punter is always, always right. So, annual vegetables and regular applications of compost are the order of the day.

Rows of veg in a market garden, thirties house on the boundary.

A food forest garden is different, not dancing to the tune of capitalistic commercial pressures. We have an obsession with yield, rather than looking at the bigger picture, the ROI rather than WTF. And if you’re looking at the Return On Investment, you are ignoring the externalities as best you can, passing the buck on greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. The tragedy of the uncommons.

The question “is it economically viable?” needs replacing with “is it ecologically viable?”.

The bottom line is, we need to decommodify food. This doesn’t mean getting rid of money, rather it means growing local and socialised food, paying for what we need to eat, rather than making a profit for the farm as a business. We need to grow enough, not more.

In the UK we are all subject to the same failing market forces, where the majority have to work all hours to pay the bills, rather than work to improve our lives and where we live. This means that many don’t have the time, resources and education to grow edible crops in our own corner of the world.

Garden Wild Flowers

In the depths of the harshest/mildest winter, I’m putting together a series of short videos about UK native wild flowers. The YouTube playlist is here, and my continually updated Mastodon thread is here.

I still have a great deal to learn about using native plants in my own gardening practise, and these livestreams are part of my education. Hopefully you will find them useful as well.

Quick Links

These are the resources I use for the Garden Wild Flowers project

And one unrelated link, a scientific study that shows ”College education partly explained differences in neighborhood plant diversity”.