I found this story interesting and inspiring! I’d never heard about the Potato Uprising in Sweden before.
(And you gotta love those cheeky billboards 😆)
Potatoes are one of the easiest foods to grow, easy to store for months, and provide significant calories. 🥔 🥔
I personally like the Ruth Stout’s “no work” method of growing potatoes. 😁
Transition Towns is a movement to bring towns and communities together to transition away from fossil fuel energy by reskilling, rebuilding, and regrowing local, home-scale economies.
It also helps people build resilience into their food systems so they’re not as vulnerable to external market fluctuations.
For instance, in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, people are becoming very hungry because they can’t afford fertilizer. The fertilizer shortage is linked to the invasion of Ukraine and rising interest rates.
Chemical fertilizer production is very energy intensive, and since Russia’s natural gas exports to the EU dropped by more than half from 2021 to 2022, this has driven up energy costs at European fertilizer production plants.
Since February 2022, the price of fertilizer has more than doubled in Nigeria and 13 other countries, according to a survey by ActionAid, an international relief group.
After a devastating tsunami hit India in 2004, locals reported that it was the villages with the greatest resilience that were up and running relatively quickly after the disaster, while those villages that had dismantled their local production of basic staples in favor of a dependance on imports that struggled the worst to recover.
These examples highlight the fragility of highly complex and interdependent global supply chains, and why movements like Transition Towns are important.
We’re headed into winter so it’s not an ideal time to plant potatoes (unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere, where seasons are reversed!). But if you’re itching to get something in the ground, the fall is the perfect time to plant GARLIC, another easy crop to grow for first time gardeners! 🌱🌿🌳
Speaker: Pella Thiel
Clip from Nate Hagen’s Podcast, Reality Roundtable #05
