Blog Action Day - Poverty and Teaching a Man to Fish

October 15, 2008 by Curt Siters

Blog Action Day - Poverty - Teach a man to fish…

The best thing we can do to win against poverty is to learn to be self-sufficient. We need to drop our dependence on government and corporations. After we learn how to do this we can teach others how to do it as well.

There is a growing movement here in America working toward this goal and I saw a great show on urtv.org where a community came together and planted what they called a “peace garden.” The garden supported the neighborhood with some fresh fruits and vegetables during the season thus reducing the demand of the residents to spend money shopping. This was money that could be used elsewhere or saved.

The great thing about this garden was that it was done by and for the people of a public housing project. Yes, a garden takes some dedication but not so much as you might think. Nature does most of the work.

There are things that you can do to increase the chances of success for your garden. Things like:

• Start your plants inside and transplant when the risk of natural pests has decreased.
• Water the garden in the evening to reduce water lost due to evaporation.
• Instead of chemicals for weed and pest control use natural stuff like compost, manure and use IPM (integrated pest management.)
• Some plants reduce the risk of pests for other plants find out which they are and plant them. This is called companion planting.

If more people would think about it and do stuff like this we could break the strangle hold the government and corporations have on our economy. I am not talking about doing away with business because there are things that we need that we cannot make ourselves.