Blooms – 2009 #2

Blooms – 2009 #1

Action in the garden:

Gardening: Back to the Future

Part of the thrill of gardening to me is the throwback to when I used to spend my summers as a young boy with my mom's parents.  I'd be there for months on end during the summer and one of our activities was tending - and harvesting from - the garden.

I loved fresh-picked and fresh-cooked zucchini.  I loved fresh-cut home-grown cucumbers and tomatoes on our salads.  And on and on and on...

So part of the thrill as I've been able to get a substantial (well, my most substantial yet) garden going this year has been in sharing the time with Thomas.  From filling the beds with soil to letting him poke seeds down into the soil, to letting him help me water it and see the growth each day.  Not only is it great father-son time... it's great earthy, home-spun time.  And we'll soon start to see the produce of our labors on our own dining room table.

So I was intrigued by this article from the Boston Globe this week that I caught over at the Skippy's Vegetable Garden blog.

The article's title:  Amid City Streets, A Growing Trend.  High produce prices send urbanites in search of a spade and a handful of seeds.

From the article (snips):

Seed sales are up 20% ... Boston has 3000 community gardens and hundreds of people on the wait list currently (plot fees are $30) .... people turn to gardening in economic slowdowns ... gardeners at least partly motivated by saving money ... 15 healthy tomato plants will produce about 100 pounds of tomatoes ...at $3.99/lb ...$400 ... estimated to cost $55 to grow those 15 tomato plants.

So... a $55 investment in tomato plants could yield $400 worth of tomatoes.  Sounds like Thomas might be running a tomato stand instead of a lemonade stand in a few years!

In actuality, we only have 3 tomato plants this year.  I only wanted to tend enough for what we needed to put on our table, and a little extra.  And since we normally have salads (with tomatoes) every night at dinner, and then oftentimes at lunch, I thought this would do it.  Plus one plant producing the bigger slicers for hamburgers, eating raw, and the like.

Nonetheless, it'll be interesting to see how much money we'll save in produce this summer... from being able to harvest our lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes for our salads to being able to get our zucchini and spaghetti squash from the garden and even some pumpkins (for decorating AND pies) in the fall.

Reflecting on this also has reminded me of Rod Dreher's (of Crunchy Cons) blog post a couple of weeks ago about kitchen work (not just the gardens, but the food prep) then and now...  He talks of Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Food," who writes that we Americans may not all be able to grow our own food, but we can certainly quit outsourcing its preparation:

Beyond the occasional backyard garden, few of us have the capacity to produce our own food. But until the last few decades, most Americans still exercised a lot of control over the quality and cost of the food entering our home: We cooked almost every day. We bought ingredients and turned them into meals; we planned menus and stocked pantries, all of which required being connected to our food.

Today, despite a mania for cookbooks, celebrity chefs and 24-hour programming on the Food Network, cooking is a dying art. According to the Department of Agriculture, half of our food dollars are spent on items cooked outside the home, and almost half of the meals served in the average U.S. household lack even a single from-scratch item.

Marketing surveys blame our crowded schedules, our "time poverty": The average American can spare just 30 minutes a day for the kitchen. But the sad truth is, many of us no longer know what that room is for. Because so many of the roughly 100 million consumers born since the 1970s grew up in households where cooking was already passe, it's a skill we never learned.

Yet if we're serious about reclaiming control of our food, the kitchen is where we have to start.

I'm excited that not only do we prepare most of our own food, but now we're growing a lot of it too.  And if this works well, we'll likely expand our efforts in coming years, maybe even looping in friends and neighbors into a garden commune.  I love, though, Roberts' point about how people who claim they have no time to cook sure do make time to watch television.  How true, how true.

Zucchini 6/4

Veggies

Zucchini.  Hoping this one's a female flower.

Survivors

It seems that they all made it... the "last cold night" that snuck up on us last night with temperatures digging back down into the 30s.  It seems, though, that every single plant - veggie and flower included - made it through safe and sound.  A prayer of thanks... and the sun is back to warm us toward summer.

Updates…

One of the tomato plants has its first two blooms... it's hard to believe that we could have our first tomatoes in the next couple of weeks.  And the lettuce is growing like crazy.