Originally Posted by Greger
Logtroll,
I think the municipal vegetable gardens are an excellent idea. Grass and flowers as well as most other ornamental landscaping are a complete waste of good soil. City workers and planners should get busy on this. A time may come when it's important.
Some of us in this high desert community (6000' elev, 15" annual rainfall) have been trying to get the town to do water harvesting using clever, but simple, stormwater runoff catchment techniques. Our rains often come in buckets but at wide temporal intervals. Our meager moisture is shed from the landscape from roofs and streets (with curbs and gutters, just to make sure it all leaves as quickly and efficiently as possible causing flooding and lots of erosion somewhere downstream). Meanwhile, we pay to pump water from deep underground up the hills to water sparse gardens (and friggin' lawns, if you can believe it).

Anyway, there are many small, dusty waste ground areas (including the yards of people who weren't as stupid as the lawn people) that could be irrigated by collecting water from roofs and letting runoff escape the streets through well-designed curb cuts, diverting it into rock mulched swales for deep percolation into the soil. Such places would make dandy neighborhood vegetable patches and reduce community water costs (coming and going) to boot!

The problem is in getting evil Collectivists to comprehend any issue that is more than 1mm deep, and in getting the Capitalists to allow anything to be free. And the Individualists are all a bunch of weirdos. Crikey!

Frankly, I don't know how we survive as a species. But I like to try to make the best of it when possible.


You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller