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Action of the Week

Cultivate a Garden

“I and my children cultivate [our acres]; and our labor preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.”

~ Voltaire’s Candide

Action of the Week, March 8, 2026

Cultivate a Garden

As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, it is a good time to take out your seeds and spades and get your hands in the dirt.

What if you have never gardened? These days, books and online resources for beginning gardeners abound (here is one gardener’s list of “must-have” gardening books), and many local Extension offices offer help or Master Gardener training programs.

And, if you happen to live in south Florida, there are gardeners willing to do even more hand-holding. With an innovative business model that ambitiously wants to build “the largest decentralized farming operation in the US—one garden at a time,” Urban Abundance (founded by Jack Sandquist aka “Farmer Jack,” who also hosts the Abundant Souls podcast) provides edible garden design services as well as installation and maintenance support, showing 750 households (and counting) how to “get the most from their gardens year-round.” Perhaps entrepreneurial gardeners in other regions will launch similar businesses.

Between declining food quality, rising grocery prices, predatory surveillance pricing, and growing centralization of the food supply—not to mention the warmongering that is threatening supply chains as well as a very real possibility of engineered famine—it has never been more important to get serious about building food resilience. Private investor Craig Tindale warns about the “brittle interdependencies” of the current global trade system, describing the potential for a chain reaction where

“[F]uel inflation becomes fertilizer inflation; fertilizer inflation becomes food inflation; food inflation becomes urban instability, sovereign subsidy exhaustion, and ultimately hunger. In this sequence, food shortages … are one of the central political outcomes of the crisis.”

The success of WWI and WWII victory gardens provides a concrete example of what a gardening mindset can accomplish. Gardening is a win-win, offering increased self-sufficiency along with abundant opportunities for a restorative connection with nature.