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Sunday, May 18, 2008

Sunday ROFLMAO blogging
Posted by Jill | 9:34 AM
The garden gnome at Eating Liberally. Just go and check out his name.

But on a more serious note, there are clearly starting to be some benefits to growing some of your own food these days, as I realized yesterday while making a lovely Greek village salad and wondering where the cucumbers had originated. The problem is that when you live in a neighborhood dominated by oak trees that are over 100 years old and over 40 feet tall, it's hard to find a place that gets enough sunshine to actually grow anything. My backyard gets ample sun in the morning, largely thanks to the removal three years ago of a hazardous split oak that was rotting inside, but by noon the sun is over the roofline and gone. My front yard gets sunshine in high summer, but I have a gorgeous, huge blue spruce in my yard that I'm spending a fortune paying an arborist to try to save from the fungal infection that is probably going to kill it anyway. It'll kill me when I have to cut it down, I don't want to speed that up.

Then of course there are the bunnies, the squirrels, and other fauna that already feast on my tulips, there have been deer sightings two blocks away, and recently, not three miles from my neighborhood of 75 x 100 lots, a bear was found in a schoolyard. My supervisor at work is an avid gardener, with huge property that gets hours of glorious afternoon sun. But having heard his tales of vegetative woe and his ongoing war against deer, woodchucks, and other beasts determined to ruin his Jeffersonian splendor over the last seven years, it strikes me that trying to grow food and having to be someplace other than your garden for eight hours or more every day seems somewhat incompatible.

That leaves farmer's markets, of which there are precious few in Bergen County during times when working people can go -- and half the stuff available there is trucked in from Pennsylvania anyway. There are a few farm stands left, but most of those truck in a good amount of their produce as well.

Still....every time I see one of those blogs where someone is holding up a lovely bunch of home-grown Swiss Chard, I wonder if there's any possibility of even managing a couple of porch tomatoes...

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Blogger Melina said...
...and if the chicken blogs are to be believed, in the world outside of those in which one's grandfather bought a little country cottage for nothing in 1940 so that one's grandmother could be near her sister Rhoda (in other words, it was not a real estate investment plan,) people are raising a couple of hens on their balcony in cities,
(in pink for Jill: http://www.shortenurl.com/4gdiz)
and of course, those upside down and tabletop gardens are very popular:
Here For my friends who's dog thinks that tomatos are grown as snacks for her , there is this:
http://www.shortenurl.com/5xjlc

and for the salad lover there is this (though it grows around one meal's worth:)
http://www.shortenurl.com/3nybr

and for after the big one or for your pot plants, which I grew somewhat like this in my wild youth, (though my setup was more tin foil than locker,) :
http://www.shortenurl.com/8vwrf

after watching I Am Legend (so flawed that its not even worth discussing) with my son last night, this all seems pretty reasonable.

I have other problems up here, like deer and bugs and predators...but I also have tons of eggs to eat...and I also have 3 of those exact gnomes from that line, which just so happen to be my favorite of gnomes that Ive seen, and available before they sell out as quickly as they come in, at Target for $19.99. So much do I love those gnomes that I keep them inside the house...

the not so big secret here is that its rather more expensive to grow your own food, especially if you go organic.
But its good to know how, just in case you have to someday.
5/18/08, 10:40 AM  
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