Someone asked me this a couple months ago during a pipe dream conversation. I replied, "It's really hard." [As a point of order, my garden is not even really organic, as I routinely use synthetic fertilizers.]
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love gardening. But to imagine that people used to grow all of their food in this manner - picking bugs by hand from what is to me an unimaginable number of plants, weeding said plants, caring for livestock, etc - is to understand why it took almost all of humanity's waking hours for millenia just to keep themselves (mostly) fed. Every now and then I think too hard about what it would take to keep all of us fed for a year and it scares me. Check out Aimee's post Winter Stores (A Thought Exercise) at New to Farm Life if you want to see a real farmer run the scary numbers. (And then just keep reading her blog as long as you want, because it is damn good.)
As I sit here, typing one-handed at a blatantly, defiantly unproductive activity like blogging, I am amazed by the good fortune I had to be born in a time and place where I am unlikely to ever watch any of my babies die of starvation because I just can't make it rain.
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