Suburban Farmers: The Quest for Goodness

THE SUBURBAN FARMER'S DISCLAIMER

Let me start by saying this: I am not a hippie or a hipster.

I say this because somehow growing your own food when you don't live on a farm became connected with that scarf-wearing, vinyl-snobbery, KONY 2012 sticker-sticking, Steve Jobs-worshipping, steampunk facial-hair-growing, microbrew-obsessed, tight-pants-wearing, ironic-glasses donning, vintage-colored cruiser bike-riding, puerile-Thoreau-quoting, pipe-smoking cardigan set.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

But that's not me.  Not my husband (ah hell, we're getting married in a month, do I have to have discontinuity and call him my fiance?) either.  He's got a beard, but there's nothing steampunk about it. It's very Bob Vila by nature.

And it's weird that anyone would associate gardening and small-farming with some kind of counterculture, weirdo liberal agenda, anyway.  People used to do this all the time.  It's how a lot of people got through the Great Depression and World War II.  But I guess that's the trend: when you had a garden in World War II, you were a good American patriot.  Now you're a pinko commie.

ANYWAY.

We decided to start our own kitchen garden, or potager as the French say, because we both had this wacky idea that we 1) didn't want to eat vegetables that had been shipped three hundred miles from Mexico, 2) didn't want to eat vegetables that had been sprayed with carcinogenic pesticides, and 3) we just all around wanted to know where the stuff we were eating came from.  Because my paranoid schizophrenia tells me that all these organic vegetables at Publix might not be organic at all.

I'm onto you.  Also, I'm not schizophrenic, really.

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

We're not vegetarians.  We also don't have enough land to own edible animals.  We're working on that.

You heard me: edible animals.  

I told you we weren't vegetarians.

Anyway, I've never been that much of a gardener.  I grew up in the country and we had two acres.  I vaguely remember trying to grow bell peppers and beans, but there was that whole part about it where I was like, twelve years old and most certainly did not have the attention span for remembering to water plants every day.  Not to mention, we lived in the middle of the damn woods, where meandering bandit rabbits and hooligan deer would nibble at anything they found like a plague of locusts.

Point being, I don't know shit about farming or gardening except that I like the idea of it.  Jim doesn't either.  We have now embarked on a journey toward fresh yum-yums.  We're gonna hope for the best and learn as we go along, because I'm sure our ancient agriculture-discovering ancestors didn't really know what the hell they were doing either.  So come along with me on this path to noms...let's see what happens.

SOWING THE SEEDS OF BLAH BLAH BLAH

So what was it, I guess last weekend?  The week before last?  Whatever.

Point is, we planted some stuff over the last couple of weeks...and I think they're doing well.  I went out and sang Tears for Fears to them all.  

Here are some pictures:

Most of this isn't veg at all actually.  Our yard has looked like Chernobyl: The Aftermath since forever, so I decided it was high time to get some prettiness in there.  From left to right: Morning Glory, two rows of butterfly-attracting wildflowers, Black-Eyed Susans, Orange Cosmos, and finally...broccoli!  My broccoli just sprouted today and I was more excited than could possibly be normal.

From bottom right to top: In the grey IKEA pot, we have Senor Garlic.  This consisted of me throwing a garlic clove in a pot and now I'm going to hope for the best.  To Senor Garlic's left are two biodegradable pots of Summer Squash.  They have not germinated.  The seeds are fifty thousand years old.  To the left and all the way up are sunflowers and marigolds.

 Marigolds, as it turns out, are natural pesticides!

My lavender plant.  Again, not a vegetable, but it is an herb.  You can tiny little sprouts coming up.
 I was surprised...lavender is supposed to take a long time to germinate.

A whole planter of mesclun, which is doing really well!

The star:  My favorite heirloom tomato, Mr. Stripey.

This is our phenomenal basil plant.  It was looking really awesome until we had an ant problem...but it's coming back.

The mint plant.  It was also devastated by ants and it got root-bound, but we saved it.  It's coming back.

Three rows of spinach on the left, cucumbers to the right.

George the Lemon Tree (who yielded 10 or 12 lemons over the winter and is eking out a couple more...he needs to be fertilized

Two more tomato plants!
The one in the back is another heirloom breed  whose name I can't remember.  BUT I was compelled to name this one "Oswald" for my friend's daughter.
 Below Oswald is the  Mr. Stripey Imposter Hybrid breed, Early Girl.
Seriously, the thing was sitting behind a sign that said Mr. Stripey and it turned out to be a hybrid.  But it's blooming AND fruiting...

Tiny tomatoes!