Home grown article

News of food price hikes and shortages is making itself heard through our newspapers and televisions. Butter, cheese and milk prices are climbing quickly and the cost of anything made from wheat is climbing along with them. We’re told that worldwide, there will be belt-tightening and less on the plate for many.But does that mean us? After all, Southland produces an abundance of food, or at least it did at one time. We grew grain (remember ‘Sargeant Dan’ at Gore), swedes galore, apples, pears and plums in every corner of the region and made cheese in numerous small factories like those that operated at Isla Bank, Waimahaka and Tisbury. We’ve been great food producers in the past but is it still the case today? Have we traded diversity of production for just the one staple, milk, and are we now overly reliant upon imported foodstuffs; Ecuadorian bananas, Australian wheat, and Chinese garlic, for our meals? Perhaps we need to ensure that, come leaner times, we can feed ourselves from foods grown closer to home. On a household scale, the best insurance against scarcity is to ‘grow your own’ and there are good signs that Southlanders are returning to this self-help, stand-on-your own-two-feet practice. Setting up a home garden is the easiest and most enjoyable step to take on the path to becoming self-reliant and more and more of us are putting spade to soil for the sake of the household budget.
It would be a good idea too if Southland communities big and small planted vegetable gardens on ‘common’ ground, like those that various Southland schools, kindergartens, early childhood centres and colleges have begun and orchards wherever there is unused space; beside halls, around sports fields or alongside of quiet streets and roads. It’s happening already around the region, driven in part by a desire for the kind of lifestyle enjoyed by our grandparents when they were young, along with a sense that knowing exactly where your food comes from is a good thing. The Southland landscape is more than just grazing land for ‘cash cows’. It can feed us all, provided we keep our regional larder well stocked.