 Today we think about Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment insurance, religious and civic organizations, GoFundMe, and friends and family as providing help for us in times of need. We call this the Social Safety Net, but before this was the Garden. Since we as humans started living in one place, gardens have been our backstop against famine. We're losing our ability to help ourselves and our community by neglecting this mainstay of every single civilization in history. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from Lotech Technology Institute. Your host for podcast number 54 on September 2nd, 2022. Coming to you are the Lotech Institutes Gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks for joining us today. We're talking about gardens before and after industrialization and the central role they've played and will play in our food system. We also have a few Institute updates. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, LotechInstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ads, someone else is making money on that advertising. And while all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they take resources to make. And if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Lotech Institute. Thanks to BeGribs, Phil J, and Sam B for signing up recently. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, LotechInstitute.org. This episode is brought to you again by the Poor Pearls Almanac. Hey, this is Andy. And this is Elliott. And we're the Poor Pearls Almanac. We talk guns. Gardening. History. Ecology. Collapse. Agriculture. Hunting. Wait, wait, guys. What about boats? You know, in boats? Oh yeah, that too. If you're wondering what's wrong with the way we're living today, you're not wrong. And if you want to start thinking about solutions for when that check has to be cashed, you can find the Poor Pearls Almanac wherever you get your podcasts. This, this isn't a podcast. We're a commercial on a podcast. You don't need to tell them that. Today, we're going to hop in our time machine and head back to look at how everybody lived up until 100 years ago. And when I say everyone, I mean rich and poor alike. When I say everyone, I also mean in every country across the world where there are people who live in sedentary lifestyles. It's rare that we get to talk about something that is so universal, but yet is so far removed from how many of us live today. We're going to talk about gardens from the origin of domesticated plants through ancient Rome, Mesoamerica, onto medieval London and Germany by visiting each one of these stops along the way. We're going to come face to face with the dwindling importance of the garden in today's over industrialized world by looking at what our grandparents could do 100 years ago, that we're now becoming incapable of doing. So let's hop into our time machine and we'll press a few buttons, beep, beep, beep, and head back about 10,000 years to the Middle East. We could also be heading back 6,000 years in Mesoamerica, China, Europe or North Africa. The story of domestication is largely the same. As our time machine stops, we see a group of people we might think are hunter gatherers. They probably wear clothing woven of fibers and are living in semi-temporary shelters. And if we stick the babblefish from the Hintjager's Guide to the Galaxy in our ear and ask the people we see, how long have you been staying here? They might say, oh, we've been here a few months. Most people transition from hunter gathering to permanent sedentary societies through an intermediate stage called seasonal sedentism. Basically, they would spend a season near a great resource, like a nut tree or a series of nut trees in the fall or rivers during the spring salmon run. As they begin to spend more and more time at the same locations each year during a season, they begin to have an effect on the plants around them. They would often kill and cut down plants that are poisonous or dangerous and help encourage the growth of the plants they could use or eat. And over time, they would select for plants that had a suite of traits, fruits that hold their seeds or meat, fruits and vegetables with less chemical or physical defenses, meaning they tasted less bitter and they were less work to digest. They often selected plants that produced more. They encouraged something called synchronous germination, which is something that wild plants don't like to do. And that is they don't all like to grow and bloom and fruit at the same time in case the weather is bad at that time. So they spread out there blooming and fruiting over a season to ensure that some plants will survive the year. Domesticated plants are easier to harvest when they all are ready at the same time. Over generations of selecting the traits they want and discouraging those they didn't, plants become domesticated. And obviously I'm glossing over a lot of research on this, but we're only visiting this group in the Neolithic for a short time and now we're getting back in our time machine and heading to ancient Rome. We're visiting Rome, but we could be visiting many other pre-industrial large-scale complex societies. It just so happens that we have good records of gardening from ancient Rome. We have gardening and cookbooks as well as preserved gardens at Pompeii. And I'm going to read a long quotation from a book by Lawson into the record here as our time machine travels forward 8,000 years in history. Quote, until the first century BC, almost all Roman gardens were cottage gardens. Their plan and culture were governed solely by practical needs. From them the mistress of the house used to replenish her larder and medicine chest and adorn the family shrine with flowers. Pliny the elder reminds the luxury-seeking populace of later states that in the past a Roman garden was a poor man's only estate. It was the only market he had from which to provide himself with food. The prime function of a garden was to make its owner self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was more easy of attainment in ancient Italy than in the Northern countries for the diet of the Romans consisted for the most part of salads. One of the chief considerations which made the Romans so fond of the garden was that its produce was always fresh and ready for the table without any cooking and thus ensured a great economy in wood fuel. End quote. And now as we see an example of this as we arrive in the Roman town of Pompeii just before the volcano Vesuvius covered in an ash in 76 BCE we arrive at the house of Panza which is a modest compound in town probably owned by an upper middle class family. Within its walls a quarter acre is devoted to a garden with eight foot wide beds, paths, canals, a spring and murals. The plots in ancient Rome our guide would tell us are called Ariae and anyone who's seen a garden in the United States would recognize them immediately. Beds were supposed to be four feet wide so you could weed them from either side just like gardening books tell you today. They had raised beds with wooden sides, little shovels and trowels and pots and fertilizer. They understood soil drainage and companion planting even if they didn't know about the exact biological reason for the success of growing different species together. But here we could even see a family that would be wealthy enough to buy all their food if they were transplanted to today's economy yet in ancient Rome they had an extensive garden for fresh fruits and vegetables. We have to keep moving and so we jump back in our time machine and head forward about 700 years and a half a world away to the village of Saren El Salvador. Like Pompeii this village was buried in Ash in the year five ninety five of the common era and as we get out of our time machine we see gardens bursting with a huge diversity of crops in a garden near a relatively modest thatched hut. Much more than we would expect to see instead of being grown in beds like in Rome they grew in what are called ridge and furrow gardens with one crop filling each ridge. The furrows are about two and a half feet apart and create a really beautiful striped mini landscape of a garden. And as we look around a little more we see almost all the trees in town are fruit or nut trees. Everything on the landscape is either medicinal edible or in some way useful. We hop back in our time machine and move forward a half a millennium to medieval Europe. In London we know a lot about what they were growing because seed purchases and garden allotments allotment rentals were recorded. The European medieval diet was sadly devoid of many of the exciting Mesoamerican vegetables like tomato potato squash beans and corn. Much of their diet was made up of root crops brassicas wheat nuts beans peas and greens and especially kales. Most of us think of wheat as the primary food of the European plate but much of the vitamins minerals and protein and diets came from potage that's potage P O double T A G E not porridge. Potage was an ever-evolving soup that lived in a big pot over the family's hearth. Each day new ingredients would be tossed in adding beans peas kale leeks onions garlic and when it was available meat fish or poultry. The next day the leftovers would just be added to create today's new potage. Even in London people had little gardens called kale yard or wart yards which provided most of their fresh ingredients. In Germany and Eastern parts of Europe people didn't have gardens attached to their properties but instead had small allotments up on the hills surrounding many of the valley towns. I remember when I was an exchange student in Germany many families had little gardens on the outside of town with a little shack and we would go up on a Saturday and take care of the gardens. We'd weed, we'd harvest, we'd have a picnic and of course drink a lot of German beer. Every weekend a harvest from the garden would be taken back to the house and this model that was still in place today has been around since the Middle Ages. Now we take our time machine back forward in time to the industrial age. We come to the early 1900s and the world is locked in the throes of the First World War. An article in Garden magazine from 1918 entitled Making a Nation of Garden Cities by Charles Lathrop Pack sums up the current state or aspired state of things during wartime. Quote, probably no other appeal to the patriotism of the American people has ever met with more widespread and generous response than war gardening. It's at the great heart of America beating from coast to coast. Inspired by the excellence showing made last year and spurred on by the knowledge that food will win the war. Men, women and children all over the United States took up war gardening this year, both as individuals and as members of various organizations they have gone about this as true soldiers of the soil in the same spirit with which their husband's father's brothers and friends went into the army and Navy and quote, obviously this is propagandistic, but during both World Wars and the Great Depression, food from far away became very expensive. Does this sound familiar to you today? At the time women controlled 90% of domestic food consumption and were the primary target of victory garden propaganda. So called slacker lands were brought into cultivation and these were basically any vacant lot, railroad right of way or even playgrounds under slogans like grass and weeds won't feed an army. And some municipalities like Cleveland even created ordinances to seize vacant lots and turn them into gardens. And the advice given to new gardeners then is also useful for us today. Don't bite off more than you can chew when you are just starting out. Build up to a large garden over a few years. And although the victory garden program ended with World War One, within a decade, relief gardens were springing up to combat food shortages during the Great Depression. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration recorded 1.8 million gardens registered with them growing 39% of all the fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States at the time. Although the government tried to discourage home gardens during World War Two under the assumption that industrial agriculture was more efficient and it was better for people to just buy food using ration stamps by the end of the war. They had given up and again supported homegrown food by the end of the war 50% of US households had gardens which provided about 40% of the US vegetable supply. And that was only 80 years ago, but it seems like much longer when we think about the capacity of American households today. So let's jump back in our time machine and come back to our present time for a minute. The pandemic significantly increased the amount of gardening done in the US. About half of households grew at least some food at home. The average value of the produce grown is about $600, according to a recent study. But this is only a small percent of the total vegetables consumed by an average household. There is a resurgence of interest in gardening among millennials and younger generations, but there is a significant break between our generations and those of our great grandparents who weathered two world wars and the depression growing lots of food at home. During the 1950s and 60s, growing consumer culture put social pressure on families to purchase all of their food at the supermarket. It was a sign of upward mobility to not have to grow any of your own food. Indeed, some honours associations forbid vegetable gardening, especially in public view. This is a disruption of a long line of generations of gardening knowledge, and this means that many of us have had to relearn the skills that would otherwise have been taught to us by our parents and grandparents at any other point in the last five to 10,000 years of human history. And of course, I have to point out that the only reason that we're able to get away without growing so much of our own food is because we have so much power at our disposal by using fossil fuels produced from California can only reach eastern markets without spoiling by rail or in some cases air. I don't think many people of this time period realize how absolutely decadent it is to have so much food available at grocery stores. Tomatoes and asparagus in the middle of winter are flown in from the southern hemisphere. The only time that people think about the seasonality of produce and fruits is when they notice prices going up and down significantly. So let's get back in our time machine for one last ride and jump 50 years into the future. It's now 2075 and fossil fuels have been largely unavailable for a whole generation. And that means industrial agriculture has been curtailed significantly. Transporting fresh fruits and vegetables across the continent is prohibitively expensive and new local alternatives are both cheaper and fresher. When we go to a typical neighborhood instead of seeing large lawns of monoculture grass dependent on fertilizer, we see backyards full of vegetable gardens. Some look like typical American style beds, while others have embraced more laissez-faire growing schemes like ours here behind me, allowing species to intermingle and create a thicket of vegetation. Former green spaces have been converted into shared potato fields, which provide much of this community's caloric needs with minimal labor. Many neighborhoods share some specialized tools and equipment that only gets used for a short time each year. Orchards that have been abandoned have been revived and expanded as community share both the work and produce of these resources. Gardening techniques from all over the world have been tried and adapted to work in different climates. Old ways that hadn't worked well have been adapted or discarded and new ideas have been developed. But much of the work comes down to elbow grease and building soil the old fashioned way, using so called waste products to increase soil fertility. While some staples can be purchased from larger scale production, much of the fresh and preserved fruits and vegetables come from local sources. If you talk to the locals in 2075, they find it hard to believe that people from just a century ago grew practically none of their own food. And when they look back at the timeline of human history, the exception is clearly the short time period between 1950 and 2030 when gardening was not a significant source of food. And now for a brief recap of the research we have going on around the Institute. This last weekend we had people out to the Institute to learn to spin flax into linen. And this is our second year offering this workshop and we're glad to meet new people and get better at processing our flax crop. On September 11th, we will be demonstrating bucket making at the Schumacher Farm Parks Heritage Festival. You can find out more information at schumacherfarmpark.org. I'll also be demonstrating thatching out the Wisconsin permaculture convergence on September 24th. You can find out more about that at Wisconsin Permaculture Convergence.com. That's it for this week. The Low-Tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted, co-produced by me, Scott Johnson, and co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute's Gardens. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com. Thank you to our Forrester and Land Steward-level members, Sam Braun, Marilyn Scarpon, and the Hambuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtech institute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music was Quiet Moonlit Countryside's, off the album We Drove All Night by Aliza. That song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the Creative Commons Attribution and Share Like license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks and take care.