tcot.us

Before 1999 I had never grown a thing in my life except for chia-pets. I then bought a house in North Carolina which had an existing smallish garden of cherry tomatoes, spinach and blueberries, which over the next 4 years, I turned into a 360 square foot garden with numerous geometric shaped raised beds. This introduction to gardening was more of an art form to me – I didn’t care about the end result so much. Fast forward 10 years and I have a larger, more serious garden. In addition to kale, corn, garlic, eggplant, tomatoes, wormwood, peppers, squash, beans, and peas, this year we planted 10 12 foot rows, 6 25 foot rows and 2 40 foot rows for a total of 330 row feet of potatoes. This post is about the energy return from my 15 bushel basket harvest and substituting gardening, at least at the margin, for fast neural hijack.

In 2004, Americans consumed about 342,700,000 (3.4e8) Btu per capita, per year. (Source). This converts to about 86,358,951 [8.6e7 nutritional] calories per year ( Source ) or 86,35…
Full article: Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way – Potatoes?

Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way – Potatoes?