How Our "Belief System Impacts Our Success (in Farming and Life)......
False or “Limiting” Beliefs Can Hold Us Captive:
- “Growing food by hand is peasant work or a quaint hobby for old people…”
- “You must have at least 5-50 acres and a tractor to get started…”
- “Gardening starts in spring with a rototiller and a seed catalog...”
- “You must be a chemist or soil scientist to build truly healthy soil…”
- “Tillage is always the first step to planting…”
- “No pain, no gain… Growing food implies some hardship and suffering.”
- “Gardens should mimic commercial agriculture, with long, straight, weed-free rows of homogeneous, uniformly developing crops…”
- “Chemical fertilizer has the same effect as compost.”
- “Herbicides and pesticides are necessary to control bugs, weeds and disease.”
- “Backyard-farming may be fun, healthy and politically correct, but it has no relevance to the bigger picture, world food crisis…”
- “You cannot viably grow protein in a backyard garden…”
- “You cannot viably grow grain/beans in New England…”
- “You cannot viably grow food in winter without fossil fuel…”
- “The ‘experts’ will solve world hunger with super productive hybrids/GMO’s…”
- “I guess I just don’t have a green thumb, after all…”
Beliefs that Open Possibilities of More Success:
- “Perfection is not required to begin micro-farming…”
- “Every garden is a good garden…”
- “Small is beautiful (and versatile, flexible and response-able…”
- “A little goes a long way…”
- “Good food is the best medicine…”
- “Growing food is a process, not a product or destination…”
- “Nature offers many ‘low-hanging’ fruit… Take the ‘easy’ ones first…”
- “Climate change opens new growing angles, windows of opportunity…”
- “Deficits can be assets…” A slug “infestation” = opportunity for ducks!
- “There are multiple layers of ‘added-value’ in backyard growing…” (Sustenance, seeds, commerce, community, curriculum, social work, healing, recreation, stewardship, carbon sequestration, food security…)
- “You need not be a soil scientist to build biologically healthy soil…”
- “You can grow greens in the New England winter without fossil fuel…”
- “Many kinds of annuals and perennials will co-exist happily…”
- “Compostables (leaves, manure, food waste, etc) are ubiquitous and free…”
- “Build it and they will grow…”
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"Gardens teach you one lesson quickly: There is no such thing as a Forever Garden. Be brave. Nuture fortitude. It is only in the act of creating, in the endless planting and feeding and watering, in the living and dying and living again that forever might be found." -- From "Slow Love", by Dominique Browning