Oldguy Plants His First Garden

That’s quite an accomplishment for this city boy. I’ll get into the city boy aspect someday, but I have to say I’m proud of myself. It’s taken quite an effort to get it done, especially considering I’m coming off of major surgery so I can’t get too strenuous. Before all this latest stuff started happening we cleared out an area behind the small shed in the backyard for the garden. After reading Bill McKibben’s book, Deep Economy, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemna, both highly recommended readings, along with Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, I realized I needed to grow my own food to ensure that I was eating something of nutritional value and without poisons. Frankly, I think what I have just had to go through is directly related to having been subject to the Industrial Petrochemical Agricultural Supermarket Fast Food Complex that has fed me the notorious Western Diet all of my Oldguy years. Let’s just say I see my garden as an act of independence and a middle finger to the powers that be.

Anyway, today we laid down a yard of potting soil and a yard of mushroom compost and tilled it under. Then we planted a row of red potatoes. My neighbor has a good crop of collards almost ready for a little harvesting, along with some snow peas beginning to climb, and some broccoli that’s flowering. We’ve also appropriated a six foot by twenty foot patch of the yard of the house behind me. It’s a rental that has a hard time keeping tenants and has been empty for months at a time, as it is now. So we just grabbed a piece in the far corner of the yard. You gotta love it, gardening as a rebellious act. We call them Alley Gardens, since they straddle the alley out back.