GROWING FOOD

Across the Fence 


By Arvord Abernethy 

I recently attended a meeting where the main discussion was on the production of food for the parts of the world where people are overcrowded and underfed. 

I thought of some things that are happening right here in Hamilton. On the way to town we pass two places where people are growing food on extra spaces. 

Elmo Newsom hauled in a lot of sand last year to fill in the back of his lot. He is getting tired of paying these high prices for peanuts and peanut butter, so he planted that sand in peanuts and they produced real well. While he and Mildred are sitting around the stove this winter toasting their toes, they can be roasting their peanuts. Their orchard and garden produced a lot more to go along with the peanuts. 

If you thought that was ivy growing along the street curb in front of the Ruel Cooks on E. Leslie, you were mistaken; that was sweet potatoes. Bro. Cook got to dig a good part of them and then the rains hit and caused some to rot. Do you remember how good a baked “sweet tater” tasted on a cold, rainy day when you were a kid? That is what the Cooks will be enjoying this winter, along with the other produce their freezer is packed full of. 

Now back to the meeting I started out telling you about. The speaker had spent 17 years in Bangladesh, one of the most overcrowded and undernourished countries of this world; a place where hundreds are starving to death each day. 

The speaker is working with a group on an experimental farm near Waco to work out a method for people of the poor countries to produce their own food. Four things are involved: tame rabbits, red-worms, vegetables and, where possible, goats. 

The rabbits are kept in wire bottomed hutches up off the ground so the droppings and trash fall through. The red-worms are put into this and it soon becomes very rich compost. This compost is then put in a frame for intensive vegetable growing. The speaker said that a frame that measures 5 feet by 30 feet could grow as much as one-third of an acre of regular garden. 

The advantage of rabbits as a source of meat is great. They do not require much space and they produce about four litters of six to twelve per each litter each year. That can mean a lot of meat in a year’s time, and those people get very little meat. Since most of them do not have any form of refrigeration, a rabbit can easily be eaten before it spoils. 

Goats make an excellent source of milk and meat, but they can only be used by people in open country. 

Mary and I saw the rabbit-vegetable combination in practice, but it was on the other end of the economic scale. We visited some cousins in Salt Lake City who are very devout Mormons, and Mormons are very thrifty food-wise. They live in a real nice residential section, but in their back yard they had some rabbit hutches where they grew some of their meat. Nearby was a small plot where a well fertilized garden grew an unbelievable amount of produce. We were taken to their basement where enough food was stored to last a year or two in case of a national disaster. Besides the canned and processed vegetables, they had large amounts of wheat stored in 10 gallon containers from which they ground their own flour and baked their own bread. 

This is a part of their belief and teachings.

Shared by Roy Ables

ACROSS THE FENCE