Homestead Hamlets: Neighborhood Gardens That Create Community Food Security

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by Lincoln Journal Star
Author Tim Rinne and his wife, Kay Walter, tend crops growing in the Hawley Hamlet hoop house.

For 10 years, I obsessed about the threat of climate change on an intellectual, theoretical level. But it wasn’t until the personal implications of climate change began to dawn on me — how it would disrupt my daily routine and the world I took for granted — that the full horror of our situation finally sank in. And in early 2009, a realization hit me, right in the stomach: I didn’t have the first clue about my food supply. I didn’t know where it came from or how it was grown.

Isn’t that a way of life that’s just asking for trouble?

I decided to make a change. Or, rather, many small changes.

Inklings of a Neighborhood Garden Plan

Although I’d toyed with the idea for years, buying some land and moving to the country wasn’t a viable option. My wife, Kay, and I both worked less than a mile from our home in Lincoln, Neb., and we concluded that the carbon footprint of a longer commute every day would only compound our ecological woes.

  • Published on Mar 7, 2014
Tagged with: community, garden, neighborhood
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