Observatio

Photo: Syracuse Cultural Workers

Everyone’s growing vegetables in their yards around here. Even I’m doing it, and I’ve never been the type to follow the crowd or, for that matter, to care whether a specific plant lives or dies.

In the past, I always concentrated on tomatoes, because it’s true what they say: you can’t get a tomato in a grocery store like the ones you used to have when you were a kid. Grocery store tomatoes are red styrofoam seed-delivery devices. A tomato -- a really good one -- should bring you close to a juicy lingual orgasm. Always eat the good ones in private.

This year I’ve branched out into peppers, zucchini, green beans, beets, carrots, radishes, lettuce, cucumbers, and melons. If I’m lucky I’ll get two or three edible samples of each by the time harvest comes around. Because it’s a daily struggle to keep these goddamn things alive. The gophers, the insects, the snails, the diseases, the cats, the heat, the weeds -- my God, it feels like all of Nature wants my garden dead, and it’s only my constant, obsessive intervention that spares it. Now that I’ve eaten a few of my own carrots, I’m devoted to its survival.

What I don’t like about the home-vegetable movement, though, is how some people are going a little wild with it. A lot of our neighbors around here have dug up their front yards, installing raised beds and irrigation systems, compost heaps, trellises for the climbing plants, and even deer fencing to keep out the foragers. As practical as the idea might seem, these micro-farms are universally eyesores, especially when the “farmer” doesn’t have quite the green thumb he thinks he has. As far as landscaping goes, I’d lean toward a carpet of blooming dandelions over some of these little experiments in locavore living.

This all seems like a fad to me, and I’m guessing that this one will last another year or two, till people have a chance to compare the costs of maintaining a vegetable patch with the amount of food it actually produces for them (see Manny Howard’s cautionary tale, My Empire of Dirt). Looking at my own humble operation, I think I’ll have saved about eleven bucks all in all.

I’m not sure it’s worth it, but, damn, will those tomatoes taste good.