My Tao - Two Hours a Day

My wife and I live in a small apartment in Porto. For gardening, we have an allotment within walking distance where we grow vegetables. Our patch is 5 by 6 meter in seize, and yields a few vegetables every week at present.

The trick to success is to use plenty of compost, which we produce in a bin in the corner of our plot. However, we should ideally have two or three bins. One bin is not enough to take all our compostable kitchen waste, nor is it producing sufficient compost to service the entire plot. Our total production as a family of four is probably three bins. If we add other kinds of compostable materials such as leaves from trees and the like, we can easily service six or more bins.

Not all vegetables require equal amounts of compost. Potatoes, don't need much. But pumpkins require a lot. Knowing where to add extra compost and where to keep it down is therefore useful when dishing out this limited resource.

An interesting observation in all of this is that the amount of compost produced by a family of four is sufficient to fertilize a lot large enough to feed that same family, especially if the plot of land has a few trees and other plants that produce compost in the form of fallen leafs and the like.

A further observation is that our 30 square meter plot produces on average 1 day worth of food for our family per week. If we were to eat nothing but vegetables for a day, our weekly production would be all we needed for that day. This means that if our plot was 7 times larger, we could produce all the food we require, provided we could trade some of it with others for the food we aren't growing, such as bread, eggs and meat.

Using nothing but primitive hand tools, my wife and I spend no more than 1 hours every week on maintaining our current 30 square meter plot, which means that a full production of food for our family would require on average 2 man-hours of work every day. This does not include cooking and preparing the food, but is nevertheless a remarkable number. If we owned nothing but a house with a 210 square meter garden, we could sustain ourselves on 2 man-hours a day, with nothing but a few simple tools and access to water. This is all we need in order to survive. Any extra production would go to market where we can trade for clothes and other necessities.

If we were to double our production from a bare minimum, we would in effect be supporting another family of four. Such surplus would presumably be enough to get our other basic needs covered. That would require no more than 4 hours of labor a day on a 420 square meter plot of land. Adding to this another 580 square meters so that we reach 1000 square meters, we can add a small orchard and other plants that require little in terms of maintenance. This might bring the required labor up to 5 hours a day on average. But all that it takes to bring the labor cost down would be some power tools.

Once we make some modest investments into automation and power tools, labor cost can easily fall down to about 2 hours a day for a 1000 square meter garden, which will have sufficient production to pay for a minimalist lifestyle. All it takes is 14 hours a week and sovereign, debt free ownership of land and capital.

What's astonishing in all of this is that anyone struggling to support a family of four on a typical 40 hour workweek, is spending almost 3 times as much time as a sovereign minimalist farmer. If modernity was supposed to free us from the burden of labor, why are so many people in full employment struggling to get by?

By Pierre Mazzacano D'Amato - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link