Ditch the gym membership… grow a garden!
It’s a shame our leaders can only tell us to “buy, buy, buy” during an economic downturn (slump, recession, whatever you want to call this). As the price of fuel and food climbs upward, they should be urging us to grow Victory Gardens, pitching in to sustain ourselves and reduce our dependence on industrial methods and foreign fuels. When economic recession coincides with a global climate crisis, it makes even more sense.
When you grow even a small portion of your own food, you reap manifold benefits. You get the satisfaction of reducing your dependence on others for your most basic needs. Vegetables are absolutely the best thing you can eat, and when you grow your own they are cheaper, fresher and tastier. You get to control what fertilizer is used (or not) to grow them, and no petroleum is required to truck them to your kitchen. You get to slow down a bit and maybe connect with your neighbor to swap surplus tomatoes or borrow a shovel. Best of all, you get to be out in the fresh air, using your muscles with a real purpose and not just completing sets of reps. It’s the perfect solution: get in shape while improving your diet.
Michael Pollan makes the point more completely in his essay, Why Bother?:
It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape [i.e., driving ourselves to the gym].
Ben-Hur move I say we take his advice. Let’s skip the health club this summer and work out in our back yards instead.
While I was checking out your post, I was also checking into gardening as part of a fitness regimen. I found this great site: http://www.gardenfitness.com/
Daaaag. Makes me which I had a garden!
(Then again, I’ve only been able to keep three plants alive in my life, so Mother Nature is probably thanking her lucky stars that I don’t.)
The best diet… eat at home! Also, going somewhere specifically to work out has always seemed a bit odd (although I do on occassion). I say work in as many physical activities into your day as possible so you don’t have to waste an hour or two three times a week.
Totally agree. Also, I extend an invitation to any of you who would like more exercise this summer to come to my back yard and help me put a new fence in. Exercise is more fun when you you’re with friends.
This is a great idea. In fact, I’m going to have my wife tear up a third of our backyard in favor of a garden. Plus, it will be less that I have to mow.
There are so many cars and so few parking spots at my gym I can’t even go there on Mondays and Tuesdays from about 4-6! They do have a shabby looking bike rack that I’ve never once seen a bike attached to…
I’m with you, Kathy. I’m a closet gardening addict, although I confess to planting more flowers than veggies. But a good weekend is one that allows for lots of time spent petting green things.
We’re not alone in this passion. The results of our active lifestyle surveys shows gardening as a highly preferred outdoor activity.
I’ll trade you a couple of perennials for a dozen ears of sweet corn. And Herwig, consider arborvitae instead of a fence. No maintenance required.
This is definitely a growing movement. Kathy, all of your points make sense to a growing number of people: get outside and get some exercise, connect with the earth, eat local food, and stop contributing to wasteful manufacturing and shipping practices. The success of books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food, and Michael Pollan’s series of books that examine the life cycle of food in the US and America’s eating habits, illustrate that these ideas are resonating with more and more people. This week alone in Chicago, the local ABC news did a story on people changing more of their yards to small gardens in order to grow their own food and, NPR did a story on a young couple who took over some family land to start organic farming. Here’s a link to the NPR story:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=21529.
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