Indefensible Food Wealth !

[jennyjj01]

I'll start by reminding all, that talk of defensive weapons and strategy is out of bounds on this forum! That's not my motive with this thread.

So, as I try to learn to grow food, and as I look at our homesteaders for guidance, it occurs to me: "Growing food: Would it be worth it?" or more to the point "Is there a threshold at which food becomes a target"

To explain....
I look from a suburban or urban perspective. Local homes have small gardens (mostly lawn) and active farms and fields are very few miles away. There are a very few 'allotment' patches in my large village and most of them are in areas near to low income homes: Within Council estates (no snobbish offense meant).

I try to envisage a slow sustained increase in poverty with runaway inflation. I also consider the perspective of the increasingly poor family which is hungry and more gifted in larceny than agriculture.

If you are still with me, envisage a situation where food price inflation is say 20%. families REALLY struggle. Would food theft follow? Would the odd sheep get stolen out of the fields? Would the odd bucket of spuds get dug up from the nearest spud field? Farmers might patrol their fields and scare off thieves with tools available to them. What's the probability that my allotment would not get raided? I fear it's easy pickings.

Time passes: Inflation hits 50%: that big family on the local estate sends out the breadwinner or the young men to bring home some food. Son #1 shoplifts a few tins of soup: Son#2 knocks over a little old lady and steals her loaf of bread: Son #3 rustles a sheep and Dad looks enviously over the local allotment patch. He recognises some spuds almost ready to harvest. He sees tomatoes in the greenhouse.

At some point, and I think fairly rapidly, allotments and domestic gardens will get looted. Immature crops will be dug up and seized by thieves. And, of course, burglaries for food and all other resources will be rife.

We would deal with social breakdown as best we can, probably some neighbourhood watch etc. but I suspect simple, unadulterated food in the ground would be fair game to the poor hungry rogue family. I say this as an ordinary person who would resort to crime, burglary and looting myself if I were hungry enough. I'm not interested in the morality angle. I'm just being pragmatic about practicality.

We can each look at this from our own perspective: The urban grocery shop owner? The suburban home owner? The urban allotment tenant? The homesteader ? The industrial farmer?

We develop our food creating skills and they will help us at the extremes of a 'new wild West' or in a gentle run up to inflation, but is there not a whole middle ground where poverty is rife, but most of our impoverished neighbours are alive and hungry?

I don't know exactly what I'm leading to, but I can't help feeling uneasy about being the one home in the street with potatoes and carrots in the ground. Having a full veg garden does not reconcile with being 'the grey man'.

Food for thought? Or silly rambling?

[GeeGee]

No silly rambling there
When we had the lockdowns there were a few break ins around here which was unusual as people were on lockdown and at home.
The nurse got broken into plus a couple of supermarket workers

The stolen goods were all from their cupboards and freezers
They didn't take anything else but food
As I was out early for the daily run instead of swim.i saw the policemen talking to one of the homeowners they asked me if id seen anything unusual such as people running off or driving away ..with food !
The nurse said to me ..its all my food .I had in even the salt and pepper !
Turns out it was in the other houses too .

That was lockdown where perhaps someone was very desperate to feed a family
In a society breakdown that veg patch and all the veg would be gone
Even the most kindest and nicest of people I suppose would do anything to feed their families

[jansman]

First of all,keep your trap shut to your non- gardening neighbours. Second,in an urban setting,a lot of folks dont know what plants such as potatoes look like.Especially nowadays.People are not savvy in that respe - in the main.
Allotments have always been robbed.So have fields. Ican remember the 70's going fishing out on the Fens with my dad and his mates.I was a lad then, but I remember that nobody in our street had anything. Those fishing trips were primarily for sport , but we caught a lot of eels and pike,and they were taken home to eat,or to sell in The Railway pub in the village.

On the way home Dad and Co. would stop on the flat roads of the Lincolnshire Fens and rob spuds and cabbages from the fields! He would give them away to the old people in the street. Everyone was skint then.I can remember fishing at s lake near the Humber Bridge in 1986. Chap next to me had a lovely deerhound/greyhound lurcher lying at the back of him.It had a few scars , and commented that it was a worker.he was a miner,and had endured the 84/85 strike. He told me that the dog had kept many people fed.The rabbits had white wooly ! fur

During the 80's I kept a team of lurchers and terriers.At night,I would take a brace of lurchers , a high powered lamp ( wish we had LED back then ) and run down rabbits ,hares and foxes ( used to sell the pelts - made enough on them to put a deposit on this house from those) On the way home,I would often grab a cabbage or whatever from the fields I was working.

The fields were fair game though.Back gardens are private property. different territory. BUT, everyone has a price in the face of adversity. It's wrong to assume that every council house dweller lives as a thief. My pension was robbed by a middle class highwayman in an Armani suit!

[jennyjj01]

...
Allotments have always been robbed.So have fields. Ican remember the 70's going fishing out on the Fens with my dad and his mates.I was a lad then, but I remember that nobody in our street had anything. Those fishing trips were primarily for sport , but we caught a lot of eels and pike,and they were taken home to eat,or to sell in The Railway pub in the village.

On the way home Dad and Co. would stop on the flat roads of the Lincolnshire Fens and rob spuds and cabbages from the fields! He would give them away to the old people in the street. Everyone was skint then....

During the 80's I kept a team of lurchers and terriers.At night,I would take a brace of lurchers , a high powered lamp ( wish we had LED back then ) and run down rabbits ,hares and foxes ( used to sell the pelts - made enough on them to put a deposit on this house from those) On the way home,I would often grab a cabbage or whatever from the fields I was working.

The fields were fair game though.Back gardens are private property. different territory. BUT, everyone has a price in the face of adversity. It's wrong to assume that every council house dweller lives as a thief. My pension was robbed by a middle class highwayman in an Armani suit!

Good stories. You make my case: Upstanding citizens like you and your Dad did/would do whatever they needed to to bring home the bacon. And each of our neighbours would have his own threshold. Good and bad folks at every step on the social scale. Indeed, good/bad are not absolutes.

[jansman]

These days 50% of my garden is perennial.Most prople would not know what most of the plants were.

[Vitamin c]

Many small independent shops 6 till late have deliverys early in the morning when shops are closed baked goods fruit n vegetables milk .
No digging around in a field the same for hotels retirement homes schools .
Loads of places have late night deliverys.
Walk around any estate at night and your spot the green lights of a freezer if unlocked all you need is a bag and torch ( what's in your freezer ).

Basic security will be a must .

[jennyjj01]

Basic security will be a must .

It will be a while before many such shops will find the risk-reward-cost equation makes a compelling case for decent security.

If I did ever get an allotment, I would be mad as hell if it got robbed. I'd have signs up saying "Thieves will be composted" and there would be some realistic heads on stakes as scarecrows

Only kidding. I know people should not be added to composters.

[GillyBee]

Or you indulge in "stealth" food. Dahlia tubers and day lily flowers are according to James Wong although I have not yet been brave enough to try them. Many weeds are also edible and few know what lambs lettuce or landcress look like if not in a salad bag or growing in a neat row. (i.e. let them self seed all over the garden and just pull up and eat anything in an anooying place.)

[jansman]

Crime has always been,and always will be,there. It just varies in type and intensity. I am surprised right now,that we are not hearing of petrol and diesel theft from cars for instance. You wait,I don’t have to leave for work for another hour - I’ll bet mine’s been done now,saying that!

As GillyBee says,most folks think salad comes in a plastic bag. I have asparagus,Jerusalem artichokes,sea kale, perennial spinach,Welsh and Egyptian onions,all mixed in with flowers - nasturtium,marigolds,roses,purslane- all edible.At the height of Summer ,most would see it as an untidy wild garden! Sure, interlopers would spot the fruit trees ,the climbing beans - the sort of stuff they would see in a shop. I doubt they would know what to do with my precious spaghetti marrows though!

In such a dire situation,I would worry more about the security of my rabbits and fowls if I am honest. Mind you,the chance of anyone getting in to the garden is remote ( not impossible though)because of the walls. Right now ,folks are still fat and very lazy.

[grenfell]

I mentioned this before about planting crops on the front garden as a bit of a test. I already have so.ething akin to jansman's garden at the front but I put in potatoes and chard right next to the footpath. Nothing ever went missing. Well I say nothing but there was one thing that I actually watched being taken. Adjacent to the path is an almond tree whose branches overhang a little. I saw a lad , a teenager , pick one off the tree and instantly bite into it. His face was a picture as he spat it out just as quick
I haven't heard any stories of food thefts round by us. Anecdotal stories on other forums of heating oil and logs being nicked and a neighbour of my brother in law had 40 slabs nicked that were stacked on the drive. Our town has it's own deer herd. They're wild but seem to have little fear of people and are often seen in town or grazing on the verges. I'm in some ways surprised they haven't been poached already but seem to be thriving and having young. It's possible to get within feet of them easily within weapon range so perhaps when they disappear it'll be an indicator.
As regards defending the food it's an almost impossible task . As said most don't know what plants are unless they're in a tesco bag but there are enough who do know what they are looking at. It's similar to the old adage that security forces have to be successful all of the times but terrorists only need to be successful once...