We must turn Kansas City into a Paradise Garden.
Creekhouse Norganic Community Garden
From the 1890’s to the 1950’s the Heart of America was a major producer of fresh fruits and vegetables. During World War II Kansas City was one of the cities with the highest number of Victory Gardens in America. We need to recreate that food system and improve upon it.
Kansas City needs perennial food gardens and edible landscapes like the ones the Indians created before 1492. They managed the forests from the Atlantic to the prairies as their primary food source. Large portions of their calories came from nut trees.
Wes Jackson says we get 70% of our calories from grains and oils. Vegetables won’t be enough to feed the city. Nuts can provide a large part of those dense calories, from oils along with protein. We need pecan, hazelnut, almond, chestnut, hickory, apple, peach, pear, cherry and all the others fruiting trees in our parks and neighborhoods. We need papaw, persimmon, fig and all kinds of berries. Flowering in the spring they beautify and also feed us.
We don’t plant orchards we spread the trees around so the pests and problems can’t jump from one to the next like dominos falling. Lets grow sweet potatoes in the park landscape beds.
We need to grow our annual crops in the floodplains where the soils are renewed by periodic flooding.
We need to have gardens outside the kitchen door of all the homes in Kansas City.
We need distributed polyculture tended by a new generation of urban farmer an Ecosystem Manager who is stepped in Permaculture principles and the wisdom of our elders. We have to relearn the ways of those who feed our grandparents until the time when we each have a Paradise Garden to Be in.
Here’s a excerpt from a blog by Joe Hollis http://webpages.charter.net/czar207196/eden.htm
“Paradise is, first of all, a garden. A garden in which everything we need is there for the taking.
2) And Paradise Gardening is a way of life which serves to maintain the garden, and is in turn maintained by it. Odum calls this the “ecosystem manager… an organism that utilizes a small fraction of the total energy budget and in return provides a service which aids the system in its function and continued survival.” ( The concept “illustrates the ideal which man should immitate in his attempts to manage a natural ecosystem.”) Genesis, with the characteristic compression of myth, says we were put into the garden ” to dress it and keep it.” Same thing.
3) Paradise gardening is not work. Work is a subjective concept: one person’s play may be another person’s work. It has nothing to do with effort: tennis, for example, is usually “play” ( unless you’re a pro), sitting at a computer terminal is frequently “work”. Work is whatever you are doing when you’d rather be doing something else. Paradise Gardening is not “work” in the same sense that what a bear does all day is not “work”. This is the distinction which the Taoists make between “doing” and “not-doing”. Genesis refers to the same matter in saying that only outside the garden do we have to earn our living ” by the sweat of our brow”.
4) Paradise Gardening is not agriculture. From chemical to organic, agriculture is a step in the right direction, but only the first step. Agriculture itself is, after all, half of the one-two punch that knocked us out of Paradise in the fist place. (Good) farmers, to be sure, love nature: but they love her in the context of plowing her up every year and deciding what to grow next. Our addiction to annual species and disturbed habitats has put us at odds with the main thrust of the biosphere (and ourselves).
Oh, Earth is patient and Earth is old
And a mother of Gods, but he breaks her,
To-ing, fro-ing, with the plow teams going,
Tearing the soil of her, year by year.
Sophocles, Antigone
Every spring, nature begins again to clothe the earth in beauty, the process of succession, the initial strands of the intricate web, rebirth of the Tree of Life. And every autumn we scrape it off, rake it into barns, take it to market: we increase human diversity and complexity (butcher, baker, candlestick-maker…) by appropriating to ourselves processes which are meant to benefit all.”
We need to give back as much as we take.
Steve Mann