What is Diffusion of Innovations?It’s one thing to say you want to galvanize a self-sufficiency garden food system (GFS), but it’s quite another to imagine just how that would unfold over time. Fortunately, there’s a well-developed theory, “Diffusion of Innovations,”...

Imagine for a moment that we could ramp up a self-sufficiency garden system enough to provide 50% of the U.S. population with healthy, balanced diets. How would that play out on a national scale, over time? Here we’ll ponder the significance of ten likely...

External FactorsMost people won’t be won over to ULFs (ultra-local foods) because they’re nowhere near as cheap, tasty, and convenient as UPFs (ultra-processed foods).On all three counts, this is a story about what we’ve long been conditioned to experience and thus...

In shopping around a self-sufficiency garden food system, it’s perhaps not surprising that I’ve come across doubts that such a drastically different approach would work. That is, provide a feasible alternative to the industrial food system, even though I’ve...

Time for another mini-post, this time about butterbeans.For over a hundred years, my family has handed down and grown what we’ve always called colored butterbeans. My great-grandma brought them with her when her family moved from Belhaven, N.C. to Roanoke Rapids in...

I can’t tell you the number of glowing accounts I’ve heard and seen about regenerative agriculture over the last few years. And it’s no wonder why. Guided by ecological principles, it promotes “regenerating” healthy soil to increase organic matter, water retention,...

Believe it or not, an insightful way to really “get” the value of ultra-local is to examine its extreme opposite: ultra-processed. Which these days is very on-point, because rising concerns about UPFs (ultra-processed foods) may well be moving us toward...

So far you’ve seen an introduction to the self-sufficiency garden system, how it relates to a broad description of farms and gardens, and what food self-sufficiency can mean. Next up: exploring why gardens are inherently far more efficient than farms, especially the...

Once in a while I’ll insert a mini-post having something to do with gardening, just as a break from the longer posts. So here is the first such.One day while walking through the rows of my garden corn plants, I came upon this little scene. A feather had blown in and...