Gardens, neighbors, vegetables

It's been ages since I had a garden. Like, twelve years, maybe? It was a ways north of Minneapolis, at about 47 degrees latitude, which put it in Hardiness Zone 3 (as opposed to the balmy Zone 4 I'd grown up with in Minneapolis). For perspective, the US-Canada border is at the 49th parallel; Minneapolis is at the 45th.

The growing season, in other words, was short. Daylight hours, however, were long in the summer, so some things (sweet corn, for example) did pretty well. Kale, broccoli, beets, potatoes -- great. Acorn squash did fine, and so did beans, and brussels sprouts and carrots. It was a respectable enough garden, considering. Zucchini, of course, took over everything. But watermelons, not so great. Tomatoes hardly ever ripened, even though I started them indoors. Twelve tomato plants might give me 10 or 11 ripe tomatoes and lots of compost. It was pointless to even try tomatoes. One year I tried to grow a row of sunflowers next to our little fake-redwood cabin. I started them inside -- they grow fast anyway, right? and we watched them grow very rapidly indeed once I put them out on the sunny side of the house. I'm totally not making this up: the day after the flowers opened, we had a hard frost and everything died. Except the kale.

I had a friend who'd moved to that area from Louisiana; every year she tried to grow okra. For seventeen years, it failed every time.

When we moved back to balmy Minneapolis, we had a house in an old, inner-city neighborhood with contaminated soil, according to the neighborhood newsletters: lead paint, traffic fumes, industry -- that kind of thing. My mom, an enthusiastic organic gardner, asked me whether I was going to put a vegetable garden in our new yard. Nah, I told her, the soil is so contaminated and I don't know how long we're going to be here (not that long, it turned out), and blah blah blah I just didn't want to bother with testing it and carting in new soil and alla that crap.

"Well what about pot gardening?" asks mom, helpfully.

"Mom, if I'm not going to eat anything grown in this yard, I'm sure as hell not going to smoke it!" I reply, annoyed.

"Containers, honey," she says. "On that big deck you have upstairs. Cooking herbs, tomatoes, that kind of thing."

"Um, yeah, right," I mutter.

Whatever.

We just grew flowers. The yard was full of gorgeous perennials, so even someone like me who isn't much of a flower gardener could easily make it look fabulous. I did have a couple of hanging pots with some mint and lemon thyme and so on, but not too much. We were oh so busy in those days.

So then I moved here about ten years ago or so, and suddenlly found myself in zone seven. I mean, you can grow just about anything here, although lilacs don't do all that well. But wisteria, wow!

Our first place didn't have a yard, or even much space for container gardening, though I think we put a couple of pepper plants on the front steps our first summer here. Or maybe we just talked about it, I can't recall.

Anyway, it was with great delight that I read about vergelimbo's fabulous fire escape garden, and also his industrial garden space repurposing project. He did have to bring in some soil, and then he fenced in the area around his shop, and now he has this fabulous garden! [The picture was taken earlier in the season.]

I'm hoping to get invited to one of the small dinner parties he mentions in his post about it all.

Because, see, I met this vergelimbo guy in person the other day. He's sort of a neighbor, and it turns out we know a whole bunch of the same people and hang out at a lot of the same places -- and have done so for years. How we failed to ever meet each other in the last like eight years or so is something of a mystery to both of us, but there you have it.

Plus we both moved here from the north to be with our sweethearts, then broke up shortly thereafter, and decided that we liked it enough here to stay on anyway. It was totally fun to talk with somebody who moved here from somewhere else -- someone who has lived in much bigger and more, you know, "cosmopolitan" type cities, and especially someone who is youthful and single and creative and educated -- who doesn't think that this little town is stiflingly dull.

I get really irked with folks who think that this place is some kind of hell-hole with nothing for hip young single people to do. I happen to think that if you're bored here, it's because you're boring, and you'd be bored wherever you lived.

I'll probably have more to say about this 'locavore'* thing he mentions in another post, but I need to re-read parts of Peter Singer and Jim Mason's new-ish book "The Way We Eat: Why our food choices matter" first.

*A locavore, apparently, is one who chooses to eat only (or mostly) things that are grown within a given radius of home. It's a great idea, no question. It supports your regional agricultural community, reduces the use of fossil fuel for transportation, and brings you, generally, much fresher, higher-quality produce -- just for starters. Plus, it's a great impetus to grow your own food, which is something I've lost touch with and I miss doing it.