"There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
--Lewis Carroll, Alice Through The Looking Glass
Years ago, a friend of mine had a fireplace issue. It was a beautiful, old stone fireplace, and it had bits and pieces that needed to be replaced. He called in a string of masons to offer bids on the job. All of them said that what he wanted to do—basically restore the fireplace—couldn’t be done. Frustrated with this and not convinced by the “impossibility” claim, my friend asked the last contractor that came to the house whether the necessary work couldn’t be done, or was simply very hard to do. Turns out, it was very hard to do, and none of the contractors wanted to take on that very hard job. So they shorthanded the conversation by calling the task impossible.
I think this particular linguistic/thought compression happens a lot. People collapse “I don’t want to do that” or “I don’t know how to do that” or “That’s very difficult, complicated, or time-consuming” into “That’s impossible.”
I read an article the other day that irked me for a couple of reasons. It was an article on How To Start A Garden written, I surmise, by someone who has done very little gardening.
The article contained some unfortunate tomfoolery, such as this:
Chives, parsley and cilantro are not fussy, so I'll plant them as seeds. But basil and tomato — those need more attention. So I'm going another route: seedlings or transplants.
Okay. I grew up on the east coast, where I gardened and helped my parents garden for decades. And, at this point, I’ve gardened on the west coast for even more decades. Basil seeds, in my experience, are absurdly easy to grow. You drop a bunch of basil seeds on soil in a sunny spot, you water it, you use Sluggo to organically protect against slugs and snails, and you get as many basil plants as seeds you planted. In fact, overplanting basil is a perennial problem at the Mental Health Rehabilitation Centers where I have worked. The seeds are small, clients plant too many in a given spot, and then they all come up.
So I’m not sure where this writer got the wackadoodle idea about growing basil being difficult. I talked to a friend about it and the only thing we could imagine is that the author planted basil seeds, did not protect against snails, and all her little seedlings got mowed down and munched to the ground before she even knew they were growing.
For the record, tomatoes are also very easy to grow from seed.
But I digress.
My gripe with this article is larger, more philosophical. And it’s rooted in the same “impossibility” sloppiness that my friend encountered with the contractors he had out to his house for the fireplace repair.
The author writes this sentence early on in her piece:
While it's impossible for me (or you) to grow everything we eat, it's not a bad time to get started on something.
First off, please don’t ever tell me what I can or cannot do. I know people who have defied all kinds of odds in all kinds of surprising ways; I believe deeply in expansive possibility; and I definitely believe in miracles. So we’ve already gotten off on the wrong foot.
But that “impossible” in that sentence. Ugh.
How many intriguing ideas, possibilities, experiments in hopefulness have been lopped off at the knees by the unimaginative galoot at the table who says, “That’s impossible”?
Let’s go at this a different way. How might we grow or raise or produce everything we eat? Maybe it will require adjusting our typical diet a bit. Doritos, for example, would probably be off the menu. But let’s approach this as if we don’t have to sacrifice yumminess, variety, succulence, and good nutrition. Let’s start thinking about the question in smallish chunks, so we don’t have to figure out how to raise and butcher a steer right out of the starting blocks.
Remember when the 100-mile diet was getting a lot of attention? People following the diet were only eating foods that were produced in a 100-mile radius around where they lived.
Around the same time, other people were practicing the bullseye diet, a phrase I first came across in author Sharon Astyk’s book, Depletion And Abundance. With the bullseye diet, you eat what’s right there in your house and yard that you produce or forage or grow yourself.
This was more than ten years ago, but I knew more people than I could count on one hand who were reliably practicing the bullseye diet for breakfast while living in San Francisco. They all kept chickens or ducks, and grew some veggies and herbs. Some also grew shitake mushrooms on mycelium-inoculated oak logs. So their breakfasts, every day, would be eggs with greens and maybe mushrooms.
What if all the neighbors on a city block, or half a city block, agreed to pool resources and maybe take down the fences between their adjacent yards? Could a block become egg self-sufficient? And herbal tea self-sufficient? Could those neighbors order 200 pullets together, raise them in the shared yard space, and after three or four months, process the birds themselves or hire someone to do it, so every household ended up with ten or so chickens? Could they then do that a second time in the same year? Could they set up a small greenhouse to start seeds and could they construct some raised beds to grow a variety of greens year round?
Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener, identifies five crops for self-sufficiency: eggs, beans, squashes, corn, and potatoes. Could that group of city people make space in that shared yard space for each of these crops and the chickens or ducks to lay eggs? Could they possibly add plants that produce healthy fats or have been historically used by native peoples for oils, such as avocado trees and Hopi Black Dye Sunflowers? In the fall, could they forage acorns that they could then process into flour? If so, they would then be producing foods rich in protein, carbohydrates, healthy fats, and various vitamins and minerals. Maybe they can swap some of what they produce with neighbors across the street who grow oranges and lemons.
You’re probably not going to be able to raise healthy meat chickens for less money than you would pay for them at Safeway. (Notice I didn’t say it’s impossible.) And, of course, processing acorns into flour or pressing sunflower seeds for oil will be much more time-consuming and labor-intensive than driving to Lucky’s and buying some Gold Medal and Wesson. These projects require time and energy and people who will consistently invest both in their ongoing maintenance. Those who are arriving home exhausted every evening after a two-hour commute from Silicon Valley will probably not have the ginger for this sort of stuff.
However—and this is a foundational idea in permaculture design—while initial set-up of these systems and projects will definitely be labor-intensive, good design should allow for fewer energy inputs as time passes. Mature avocado and lemon trees will just do their thing. Once you’ve built and rodent-proofed the chicken houses, you may need to do minor maintenance, but that element of hardscaping is done. Ditto setting up the greenhouse. You will need to eventually inoculate new logs with mushroom spawn, but that first batch should produce for three or four years.
Saving money, labor, and time are not the primary goals here, at least not initially. There are other reasons to do this sort of thing. Sharon Astyk’s motivation for the bullseye diet was to lower her household’s carbon footprint; if she could cut out the fossil-fuel-powered travel involved in transporting food from Point A to Point B, and in driving herself from home to Point B, and in driving the purchased food back home, she was making an important contribution. There’s also great satisfaction in doing something for yourself, and you may be somebody who appreciates that or you may not, but if you are, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Years ago, my oldest sons went to a cooperative preschool. Responsibilities for organizing and leading activities rotated among the parents. On one of my rotations, I brought in our pasta maker from home and made and cooked fettucine with the kids. One of the other mothers came up to me after the project and said, “I would never do that. I would go to the store and buy pasta.” (When I told this story to a friend, she said, “You should have said, ‘You mean I can buy pasta?’)
So to each her own. You say tomayto, I say tomahto; I grow potatoes, you buy them at Trader Joe’s. Whatever.
Just don’t tell me what’s impossible. It gets my hackles up.
I understand that, given the right atmospheric conditions, oil and water mix.
Here’s a short video on the Dervaes family’s urban homestead in Pasadena. The Dervaes family has been involved in some truly bizarre trademark disputes that I find troubling. But I still respect their urban farming accomplishments. It really is amazing what they are able to shoehorn into this small city lot: