Homegrown food

©Janet Allen
Delicious (and productive) kale

Even in our smallish (80 ft x 180 ft) urban-suburban yard, we grow lots of our own food.

The last few years, we have produced 500-600 pounds of food each summer. That's a lot when you consider how much lettuce, for example, there is in a pound! Of course, heftier vegetables, such as tomatoes and summer squash, boosts our total, too.

More nutritious and delicious

©Janet Allen
Delicious home-grown beans

And though there is no way we can prove it, I suspect our food is more nutritious than any we could get elsewhere. Why? Because food incorporates the minerals in soil, and our soil is likely to be much healthier than soil elsewhere—certainly healthier than any soil depleted by industrial agriculture's monocultures and emphasis on adding just a few chemical to boost production.

In addition, we can choose varieties of fruits and vegetables that are just good food, not commercial varieties whose main characteristic is that they all ripen at the same time or can survive long trips on a truck.

©Janet Allen
Purslane: volunteer food

The easiest food to grow is purslane—no effort at all since it has been one of our most common weeds as long as we've lived here. And to think that we threw it out for years!

And when the time between harvest and eating can be measured in minutes, not days (or possibly weeks), fewer vitamins and minerals are lost.

Besides being the most sustainable way to produce our food, it's also a way to produce delicious food. Our raspberries, for example, are the kind of fruit that money can't buy (or at least reasonable amounts of money…)

Room to grow

©Janet Allen
Most of our vegetable garden area

How to we have space enough to grow so much food? We don't have any lawn to speak of! Lawn is a real waste of soil and space.

More about our edible garden is on Our Edible Garden website.

More about reducing our lawn is on Our Habitat Garden website.

Reflections

Modern eating is above all about forgetting—about what it is we are eating, about its origins in living systems.
The alternative is to learn to know our food intimately, to care intensely about its quality and its role in our lives, to share it with gratitude and respect. Whenever we grow our own food, or seek it from local sources, we reconnect with the natural year, the passing of the seasons, the interdependence of life in the great web.
By participating in the creation of our food, from soil to table, we find our way back to food as a sacred gift.

~ Harvey Ussery

The work of growing food contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it, of course, but there is something particularly fitting about enlisting your body in its own sustenance. Much of what we call recreation or exercise consists of pointless physical labor, so it is especially satisfying when we can give that labor a point. But gardening consists of mental work as well… None of this work is terribly difficult; much of it is endlessly gratifying, and never more so than in the hour immediately before dinner, when I take a knife and a basket out to the garden to harvest whatever has declared itself ripest and tastiest.

~ Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food, p. 198

Resources

Univ. of Illinois Extension: Purslane: Weed it or eat it?

Read more about our edible garden on Our Edible Garden website.

If you're in Central New York, join John and other Central New Yorkers at our monthly Edible Gardening CNY meetings. They're free and open to the public.

Read more about our current edible gardening projects on John's edible gardening blog.

Videos

Chipotle: The Scarecrow - An animated comment on "All-natural" labeling; growing your own food