A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss (business opportunity for gardeners?)

[depakid]

beats the hell out of paying landscapers to mow the lawn and trim useless bushes....



That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

Her neighbor Chase Ault, a business consultant, recently had a vegetable garden installed with a customized set of plants and a regular service agreement. “I am working 24-7 these days, but I wanted to have something growing in front of me,” Ms. Ault said.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html?em&ex=1216872000&en=3e079ade8d9776f8&ei=5087%0A

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. AWESOME! recommended. This is something local governments should jump on.

I rent my house and my landlord wants me to tend my yard instead of growing food. But any kind of nod or tax incentive could get this going, and it would mean keeping a WHOLE lot of (taxable) income in the local economy that would other wise fly out for increasingly expensive oil intensive imported food.

[Delphinus]

2. K & R!

I'll do all the work - just let him come and see what would be the best things to grow (and answer a few of those 'what's this on my leaf?' and 'when will these get ripe' kind of questions.

Too cool!

[aspergris]

3. Great

I am a big believer in gardening, and this is a great way to combine it with the entrepeneurial spirit and get others involved.

Fwiw, I don't think fast food is the "enemy". Fast food, and local food can co-exist. They do for me.

I have lots of kick-ass herbs, tomatoes, onions, all kinds of great stuff in my garden.

ANd I'm in the heart of suburbia. I'd rather pick my food, than mow my grass!

[we can do it]

4. WOW - I'm In , I'm already doing some neighbors gardens organically

[eppur_se_muova]

5. "Lazy"? How about "don't have time" ?

Sounds like a good job niche.