Books

Mr. Hodgson, maybe you would write a book about sneaking invisible and little-known edibles into ordinary looking landscaping. Such as vining a fence with malabar spinach, vining a pergola with drought hardy beans, placing decorative urns filled with sunset muskmallow. A tree collard standing six feet tall in a corner. Frost-hardy Somerset grape growing on a fence up north, hard shell squashes such as red Japanese kuri, and seminole pumpkin in the south. Radishes under trees. Breadfruit tree, Moringa tree. These are hardy, perennial, no-work plants. People also need to know they can eat bean leaves, radish leaves, squash leaves. Urns out front containing edibles don’t look like a food garden, but are. This isn’t gardening, it is just “putting,” Set it and forget it plants, almost weeds. No work, and it also doesn’t look like food. You could even stick artificial flowers in some of those, to make them look even less like food. “Micro perm,” might be the concept, drawn from the permaculture concept, but on a tiny scale. It’s ‘Reverse Gardening.’ First you: find out what grows very easily where you are, and then learn to like it, to eat it raw or learn to cook it. If you plant right before rain, you don’t even have to water. Food for the non-gardener. Normal gardening is an amusing combat sport; insisting that nature bow to your will. But some have no interest in gardening; this might be a way for such peope to eat effortlessly. By tilling their ideas and their habits, instead of their soil. Eating easily grown if initially unfamiliar foods. But only well-established, proven, crops, nothing experimental. Just a thought….