Urban Farming

Now that we have a home with a yard, albeit a standard 40x130 lot dominated by a house with an addition and deck on the back and an over-sized garage, we're skipping the CSA this year and are trying our luck at urban farming. Well, just with a focus on plants and sans the chickens and goats. The former owners left behind two raised garden beds and two planter boxes, so with most of the hard work of the garden prep done for us, we'd have felt really lazy if we didn't at least try to plant something.

So there we were on Mother's Day, a day of blue skies and pleasant temperatures, a respite from an unseasonably cold and dismal May, our happy, little family turning the soil in our first gardening venture. Oliver sat on a blanket in the grass happily gumming the garden hose and watched his parents debate an activity completely outside their standard repertoire. Chris peppered me with questions I couldn't answer, like how wide the rows should be or how close together we should place the seedlings. I had checked out numerous books on gardening from the library with titles like Garden Primer, Edible Gardening for the Midwest, Container Gardening for the Midwest, Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening and so on - practically the whole gardening section - and then found little time to do more than page through them. I decided it would be less stressful to let the books decorate our coffee table and instead just throw down some seed and see what happens. Chris, who strove for perfection in planning and executing the gardens, had claimed the bed on the side of the house as "his garden," and spent the weeks before the last frost planning and building the perfect bunny-proof cedar fence for his small plot. With the perimeter of his garden looking that good, he wanted a planting strategy with proven results and didn't like my laissez faire approach.

Our plantings include the usual tomatoes and zucchini, as well as peanuts and one lone pumpkin plant. I purchased it with visions of carving pumpkins with my son (as if a then 13-month-old is going to be actually doing any carving). Now I'd wished I'd bought more, even at the risk of over-running my garden with what will turn into huge plants, since I'm afraid my one plant could die on me. Chris assured me that come fall, there'll be no shortage of jack-o-lantern-worthy pumpkins I could just buy.

If we experience a complete crop failure, we won't be without other options for locally-grown produce. The revered St. Paul farmer's market is within biking distance and the metro area's most urban "farmer" is utilizing otherwise unused land right in our own neighborhood. Or I can try looking longingly over the fence at my neighbor's well-tended garden bed and hope they take pity on us and share some of their crop.

When I told my grandmother that we'd started on our first garden and how I had no idea how successful we'd be, she hoped Chris and I wouldn't be repeating family history. My grandparents started their family in the rowhouses of Northeast Philadelphia, which sprouted following World War II and stretch block after block for miles. The tuck-under garage on the backside of the house left no yard, so when they moved with my dad and uncle to the suburbs in the late 1950s, my grandfather had big plans for vegetable gardening on his 3/4-acre lot. According to my grandmother, he liked golfing more than tending to his garden and the only vegetables to be grown in any following year on Annasmead Road were my grandmother's tomatoes.