John of All Trades

10am on this brisk Saturday morning (yes, 30 degrees is brisk in Gainesville) found me paying close attention in a room full of people at the INDIGO Green Store downtown. We were there to hear what Michael from the Edible Plant Project had to say about edible landscaping, local food production, and the propagation of perennial, native, food-bearing plants. The morning began more like the beginning of an orienteering or geocaching adventure, with a swarm of people departing on various modes of transportation almost immediately with directions to an old fallow blueberry farm a mile or two away. Things didn’t seem to be shaping up to a very good start at that point, but things changed upon arriving at a nondescript track that threaded its way back into the blueberry farm and the Edible Plant Project’s gardens.

As we waited for everyone to arrive, some really interesting conversations sprang up, and continued sporadically throughout the class. Most of it was related to the task at hand, but I was struck by how many people are really deeply interested in learning how to apply the lessons of modern homesteading, and how far we’d come as a group. This is the crowd I never knew existed in Gainesville; I’d been to several classes at INDIGO in the past, and while people always seem interested and friendly, there’s usually a certain reluctance for people to really embrace their inner hippie and get their hands dirty. Not so here; people were talking all over the place, about how many chickens they’re raising, or how they plan on applying ideas of edible landscaping to become self-sufficient (in terms of food) in their retirement. Some of us talked at length about the CSA situation around town, and what to do if you can’t get past Rosie’s waiting list. At one point, I found myself talking with Michael about how I might improve my prototype greenhouse design by storing more water in the pipe and choosing better pipe materials to absorb more sunshine (and heat) for overnight.

I have to say that today was a high point in my re-education about Gainesville, which really began about a year ago. Since then, I’ve discovered that you can get just about all of your food – except for the odd out-of-season tomato – within 50 miles of my house. Now, we have pork, beef, chicken, more veggies than we could possibly eat (even if we knew what they all were), milk, and much more…and we spend almost no time at the grocery store these days. Seriously. Today represents the next step in that process, which I first glimpsed last spring when I learned about square-foot gardening. Using the knowledge of edible landscaping with perennials, I think we can really take that next step, and start making our land produce for us without constant coaxing.

My first project on this subject is going to be to see whether I can root some cuttings from fig trees down the block that produce some truly beautiful fruit. Oh, and there’s that orange tree a few blocks away…I guess I’d better start volunteering out at the Edible Plant Project so I can learn as much as possible about this stuff. It simply has to be as important a life skill as knowing how to balance your checkbook.