Grappling with America’s nascent authoritarian era? This Kansan started a family garden.

Like many, I’m grappling with the fallout from the presidential election. Life being life, the election result caps a tumultuous time for me. 

My father is dying from a three-plus-year battle with myeloma. My mother needed emergency surgery to correct a health issue that flared up due to the stress of trying to care for my father on her own. I now fly home from Lawrence to Charlottesville, Virginia, as often as I can. I’m from just outside C-Ville, as it’s dubbed locally, and I’m an only child. 

Add to all this that I’m father to two boys, 6 and 4, the oldest being autistic and also diagnosed with my ADHD. 

To stay sane, I meditate, lift weights, bike as often as I can, and try to stay off my phone.

And I used to garden.

One recent, chilly spring morning, I got a wild hair: I went looking for some ancient vegetable seeds from a dusty and cobwebbed corner of the garage. They were buried under long-unused root heating mats, dry and furry peat seed starting pucks and cups, and a menagerie of bird-feeding paraphernalia.

I brought the peat pucks outside to my boys, who were wreaking havoc in the backyard. We soaked them to prepare them for seeds while we selected several varieties of tomatoes to start. The seed packets were stamped with dates in years as far back as 2018, so we started something on the order of 30. I figured most would not germinate.

We now have 30 stubbornly healthy, 104-inch tomato starts. 

Let’s just say my family and neighbors have all been notified that they’ll not need to buy tomato plants for their gardens this year.

Why garden now?

My boys are just old enough to be told to stay out of the garden beds, and actually stay out of them. They’re self-directing more — they don’t need to be underfoot and don’t need to undo whatever chore I’m doing for their devilish entertainment. They’re (kind of) sleeping through the night. There’s now a little more room — mentally, spiritually.

There’s also a dark urgency. I’ve recently bought my family approximately a month’s worth of freeze-dried food, a 20-pound bag of rice, a few cans of propane and a 3,000-watt solar generator. 

Before I decided to detox from social media and the little bit of news that trickled to me through it, the phrase “we’re on our own” seemed to crop up frequently. In this second Trump era, that may be the truth.

Every day some new agency endures firings. The fallout? Benefits slashed, services cut, support and guidance denied.

If this country — if this society — is going to make it, we’re going to have to get off our phones and out into our yards and streets with our neighbors. This is where my tomato starts come in. Most will be given away — they’ll feed my community. Having a solar generator means at least one house on the block will be able to stay connected to weather reports and radio news.

Like every urban homesteader aiming to overdo it, we also hope to buy and raise some chickens soon.

That said, wait times at online hatcheries have been quite long this year with May or June deliveries for orders placed back in March. Missouri’s Cackle Hatchery reported customers lining up before they opened for business.

On the bright side, this means others are digging in — buying and raising chickens for eggs and meat. I hope those chicken-buyers are gardening, too. I hope they’re doing so with a mind to share the bounty.

With the way things are going, I don’t know that I’ll be able to track news of any gardening or urban-homesteading revolution. I have a sense it will be harder and harder to know what’s going on with any resistance before things get better.

All I can do is be present. My family doesn’t plan to flee to Canada or Europe. This is home. Lawrence is my town. This is where we fight.

If I helped to rekindle your spirit some, great. Here are some ideas on where you might start.

If you’re eager to come down from the clouds and find a local cause, your food bank likely needs your support. Thanks in part to Trump administration scrutiny and DOGE-related efforts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently canceled shipments of fresh food to Kansas and Missouri pantries. There’s no clear sense of when or if deliveries will resume.

Local farms also need your support. If you’d like to source more of your food from nearby and invest in your community’s food supply chain, farm-to-table advocacy organization LocalHarvest hosts a Community Supported Agriculture page that can show you which farms in our area will sell to you directly.

If you don’t have access to a yard or other city-located greenspace, a community garden may be for you. The American Community Gardening Association hosts a Find a Garden | Share a Garden page, and there are numerous ones in Kansas.

Chicken-wise, you’ll be waiting if you want to raise them for meat or eggs. The good news is there are many quality hatcheries that will ship numerous breeds directly to you.

That said, there are scammers out there (yes, even for those just wanting to purchase baby chickens). This BackYard Chickens article offers solid advice on how to separate fraud farms from reputable operations.

Best of luck, whether you garden or raise chickens or subscribe to a CSA. I hope you find the community you need and the strength to carry on.

Haines Eason is the owner of startup content marketing agency Freelance Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.