First Lady Michelle Obama has planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Personally, I am very excited about this and what the implications of this action might bring about. The blogosphere today is full of people talking about produce, organic food, and air pollution. They all go together, you see.
While I am not a huge buyer of organic produce because of it’s cost, I love locally grown. Here in Washington, a lot of our produce is locally grown or it is shipped in from Oregon or California. Compared to other places in the country, we’re not doing all that bad. When I see that a certain product is from Mexico, I always think twice about buying it. It’s never expensive, but I picture in my head the truck or the train car that used up a ton of fuel just to get the piddly little piece of produce to my grocery store.
I’m also all for growing some of your own vegetables. I don’t have a yard. I have a tiny slab of concrete that we call a “patio.” On this “patio” i have a small fig tree. In the summer I grow tomatoes. I suppose if I were really ambitious, I could grow quite a few things on my little slab. You’d be surprised at the small amount of space needed to grow your own produce. The cost is crazy cheap and if you are dutiful to your plants, they yield quite a lot of bounty. Your local home store like Lowe’s or Home Depot always has seeds, and small plants for sale in the Springtime. I also like this place, Gurney’s. I bought a small lemon tree, a fig tree, a dwarf orange tree and a key lime tree. Unfortunately, workmen at our last apartment completely effing killed all of my other trees except for the fig tree which has proven to be quite a hearty plant.
I have dreams of getting a house someday with enough yard to plant a small vegetable garden and maybe even erecting a small green house. Growing my own produce that I know is safe (we keep having killer spinach scares!) and cost effective is very attractive to me. Also, homegrown tastes better! I have memories of being a little girl and going ot my grandparent’s house where my grandfather always keeps a vegetable garden and picking turnips and eating them on the ground. His cabbage and tomatoes are the essence of fresh and clean. The stuff you get from the grocery store can’t even compare. I also feel that Lukas might be ab;e to appreciate vegetables and fruit more if he were able to help grow and harvest them.
At the house in Adamston, we had two apple trees and two chestnut trees in the yard. Before we moved I was plotting putting in a vegetable garden. I miss those apple trees like crazy. Apple pies, apple cake, pork roast with apple chutney…all from the bounty in my backyard. It was simple and I had to work for it, pruning the trees and making sure the apples were picked so that newer bigger ones could grow….but I have never been happier as I was in those days.
We are still working out some tiny details about what is going to happen once we get back East. Stress has become almost an odour in this house. The dream is that we will be able to save enough money in a few months for a down payment on a house and buy. Settle down. PLEASE GOD I DON’T WANT TO MOVE ANYMORE. I want stability….to wake up in the morning and know that I don’t have to worry about moving or leases. It would be nice to wake up on a sunny day and go outside and have a yard to oversee. Trees to prune, a garden to tend to, grass to trim. I miss that salt of the earth type of work, I really do. My mind is more at peace when my body is worked to exhaustion.
I would like to see more of a proactive move towards growing some of your own produce. In Wired magazine a few months ago, there was an article about people in small apartments in big cities making tiny vegetable gardens on the rooftops of their buildings or on their tiny patios. Really, if you can fit seating on your patio, you have enough room to grow vegetables or fruits that grow on vines. You can also grow your own herbs. This would be a great thing to see indeed. You can’t grow deep fried food in a garden (although you know I love me fatty trash food). It honestly does force you to rethink your diet when you’ve got a big bowl of fresh fruit/veg on your counter. You know you’ve only got a small window to eat them before they go bad and you make yourself think up creative ways to use them before resorting to the microwavable atrocity you usually go for.
