What's environmentally better? Driving 7 miles to the farmer's market or walking 1 mile to...

That's what we're in the process of doing. I've planted strawberries and this spring will be planting several berry bushes. Fruit is usually pretty pricey, even at costco, so I figure the more of it I can grow at home the more we'll save. What I really should do is xeriscape the front yard. Bloody waste of water (and money) in our climate.

 

Team up with your neighbors, too... No sense in you trying to grow everything, but if you have an orange tree, and you know someone who does lemons, peaches, apricot, plums, apples, etc., then you all have a variety of fruit throughout the year instead of just having one type ad nauseum.

 

I grew up in Michigan and my grandmother lived in northern Michigan. She had a ~ 1 acre garden where she grew her vegetables, 3 apple trees, and one apricot tree. She would pick in season and preserve for the following 8 months she couldn't grow food. She used a combination of canning, drying, and freezing. My grandmother died a few years back at the age of 86 in good health. (She died during an operation to put in stent in her heart as a preventative measure.) Her sister just died a month ago at the age of 96.

If you can't garden you can still eat locally grown produce all year. When your farmers market is open buy in bulk and preserve for the rest of the year.

My wife and I will be doing a combination of the two this coming summer. We are tripling the size of our garden and will be buying from the farmers market the items that we don't grow. We already have canning equipment and a dehydrator but will need to add a chest freezer this summer.

 

Kudos to all posters. Music to my ears.

The actual question posted by Burritos is complicated to figure out (I first wrote easy, until I thought about it a bit). A semi-trailer gets about 10 mpg (?), and carries about 2 x 3 x 15 meters of volume (?), or 90,000 liters. Your veggies are about 5 liters say.

The truck used 200 gallons to move 90k liters, or 0.0022 gallons per litre -- not much, and only good for 0.5 Prius miles to move 5 litres. So all other things being equal, you have your answer. Me -- I would use the local market 6 miles away.

Truck volumes: Trailers and Semi-Trailer Types by National Semi

 

Semis get more like 5 mpg. Nice mix of gallons and litres, BTW. Don't see that too often.

 

Ultimately, I think growing your own is the real answer. We should all be urban farmers. Even if you live in an apartment and don't have any land, you can grow many food items in containers and hanging baskets.

 

true, that. And it's a nice way to relax and feel a sense of accomplishment. Growing your own food is brilliant fun. It's a good learning experience for the whole family (is that an advert?)!

 

But I hate gardening!!

 

You like eating, though...or are fruit and veggies not part of your diet?

 

Gardening can be an awful lot like work, but the rewards are many.

We have all the fresh tomatoes we can eat, can, and give away (lots of brownie points). We freeze enough green beans to last until the next years crop. We still have about seven quarts of peaches canned in a syrup that was made from Wife's Uncle's honey from his own bees. I have peaches fresh off the tree from August, through September, and into October sometimes. I'm still working on getting a good crop of apples, but this year looks promising. I cut down the cherry tree...no, really, I did...so there's no more cherries. The apricot tree should bear a good crop for the first time this year...last year we only got two edible ones from the first summer.

The asparagus is going to be fabulous this year. It's amazing what that water stuff does when used properly. The horseradish crop is superb.

Radishes, carrots, beets, okra, collards, cucumbers, lettuce, pole beans, onions, parsnips, herbs, flowers, lilacs, etc. All you have to do is stick the starts, seeds, or bulbs in the ground and do those few but important things that keep them alive.

Then, stand back, grab a beer, and stay out of their way!

 

The sentence I wrote "litres per gallon" must have been *real* clear.

Salt in my wound though. I find the US systems of measurement SO annoying. It almost excuses most American's inability to sum up simple problems without a calculator.

 

I was just takin' the piss out of yah. In the army we regularly mix units. All distances in the service are in metres/kilometres (or "clicks" as we like to call them), but volumes are in English units.

I find English units annoying too. Blame the Romans, thats where all that 12 based shite comes from.

 

Oh is that the origin of Base 12 counting? I thought some Olde English king must have had 12 fingers and toes.

 

The Britons caught the disease from the Romans when they came to visit.