One of the most obvious and critical first steps toward community resilience (in tandem with ruthless debt reduction) is to start a garden. This provides you with:
- Fresh, low cost, and high quality food during the growing season.
- The skills and the head start needed to deal with systemic breakdowns in the agricultural supply chain or rapid price inflation of foodstuffs.
- Income potential/community connection through your local farmer's market.
Unfortunately, many of the skills/tricks that our grandparents used (at least the smart ones) have been lost and the methodologies associated with traditional line gardening (rototilling, soil reclamation, constant weeding, etc.) is very difficult and time consuming. The best method I've found that will get you gardening with a minimum of hassle/time/money, produce high quality results, and will teach you many of the skills/tricks needed in a easy to learn method is called square foot gardening. Mel Bartholomew (many of you, hopefully, already know about him) has perfected a method of gardening over the last few decades that radically improves on traditional approaches.
What would be interesting is to do an ROI calculation on this method. Essentially, compare the investments in time/money etc. vs. the output (and the equivalent cost in food from grocery stores). Given the ease of installation, almost zero reliance on tools, and low mx requirements.. I suspect it would do very well. This method also looks fairly interesting for lawn gardening entrepreneurs (as in, everyone currently selling lawn mowing services should also be offering low cost garden services).
From a reader: My wife recently compelled me to buy a house in the 'burbs, tear up the sod from the front yard, and build several raised beds for square-foot gardening. At first "there were concerns" among lawn-loving neighbors, but now that it looks nice and is brimming with heirloom vegetables, herbs and flowers, neighbors regularly stop to exchange seeds, transplants, produce, compliments, gossip, favors, etc. Vegetable gardening in the front yard turns out to be a powerful way to forge ties of mutual support with others in your local community.