Comment on Why don't communities build massive gardens for food? That way it would undercut the price of big retail stores.

• tankfox@bookwyr.me ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You don’t use the garden to grow all the food you’re going to eat, you buy bulk goods like rice and beans, pasta, etc that you can get for low cost in bulk and then replace the greens and veggies a healthy person would get at the store with food from the ground which has a fixed labor cost instead of a ballooning dollar cost.

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  • GreenBeard@lemmy.ca ⁨27⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    This. Lots of useful vegetables aren’t even bulk producible because of natural properties that make them hard to grow in large industrial scales. It’s the micro-nutrients and supplementary food content that a community garden produces, not your major staples. You’re not growing a corn field in metro Brooklyn, that’s not the point. But it doesn’t actually take much effort to add some locally grown lettuce to your diet from a community garden instead of shipping it all the way from California, and it reduces demand therefore lowering prices for everyone else to do so.

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    • tankfox@bookwyr.me ⁨2⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      People think of veg as something with a timer that counts down; you buy it as fresh as it’s going to be and then you have to eat it before it turns into slime.

      In a garden the timer is running the other way; every day the food gets fresher and better and bigger, and if you’re planting at the same rate you’re eating the garden becomes a daily food pipeline.

      Be aware; gardening is a gateway to canning, because that’s how I keep eating my garden in December

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