I’ve written quite a bit over the years on the topic of sustainability. Much of my writing has concerned environmental sustainability and managing impacts in order to avoid ecological harm to the planet.
Here I want to twist that topic around a bit and point it back at ourselves…
with the idea of avoiding self-harm.
How can we live lives that help us to be more self sustainable and less reliant on others…
such as the phone company, electric company, bread, milk and cheese companies and other mass manufacturers of the shit we consume into our bodies on a regular basis?
Having more control over one’s life is a good thing.
I know that to be especially true in business. The more I can control, or at least exert a high degree of influence over, the better I can predict what will happen next and that’s always a good thing in any economic undertaking.
And I believe that principle also applies to the business of life.
Examples can be found lurking right inside your fridge. Food that’s mass produced is full of stuff we don’t know is there…
and if we did (and the long-term effect it can have) we probably wouldn’t dare eat it.
So why not produce our own food?
Some time ago I got into organic gardening. The reason I did so is exactly in line with the topic of this post. To be more self-sustainable and less reliant on some profit motivated corporation to make sure I’m properly nourished.
Oh sure those huge carrots and strawberries in the produce section of Walmart look healthy, but they’re not. They’re grown in food factories that inject all manner of chemicals and pesticides to make growing them as efficient and profitable as possible.
And if you’ve ever tasted a piece of produce not so injected, you’d know that that Walmart stuff actually tastes like crap.
So I tried to learn how to grow my own food, first with organic gardening.
Organic gardening is great as long as (1) you have a place to do it, (2) time to do it and (3) you don’t plan to move any time soon (organic gardens are not very portable).
But because I really had none of the above conditions met very well, I migrated to another form of self-production of healthy food…
hydroponic gardening.
When I first starting researching it I came across all these complicated systems of doing hydroponic gardening that were expensive and seemed to require an engineering degree from MIT to implement.
That is until I moved to Perez Zeledon and stumbled into my now good-friend, David Picado.
David, who’s sort of a tico whiz kid, took a course offered by INA (which is the Costa Rican free education system for ticos to learn all sort of trades and skills) in hydroponic gardening and then started his own little business constructing and installing personal hydroponic green houses.
I came across his advertising one day (painted on a large rock near my house) and decided to give him a call.
He installed a very simple and rudimentary greenhouse and hydroponic system in my back yard and I’ve had it there for a couple years now.
They require very little space and can be moved relatively easily.
In fact the concept of hydroponic gardening the Picado way could be installed in a space as small as a 50th floor balcony overlooking Central Park.
You can do it virtually anywhere. And the cool thing is that the plants grow incredibly fast and delicious. So fast that you can be eating lettuce from your garden in about a month.
All it takes is a little sustaining substance for the plant roots (I use carbon chips), sunlight and the proper amount of liquid nutrient that you administer to the roots daily.
That last part is a bit complicated for this post, but the information is no big secret…
just google it!
That to me is a very good thing.
