A few months ago I started watching a show called "The Wild Within" on the Discovery channel. The show was about a guy who had made it his personal goal to get back to the basics, to dig up that primal instinct within every human to hunt and gather. He travels the world (obviously a bit unrealistic, but the traveling is what makes it interesting on a weekly basis) hunting game and gathering food from the earth, taking pride in being able to literally bring home the bacon (or venison) for the family. The point of it all being that we as a society have lost that age old connection with mother nature, we have lost the natural ability to eat from the earth.
Over the course of the last few years I have slowly started to get back in touch with nature and the cycle of life. Two springs ago Jordan and I planted our first garden in the back yard. We ended up with a plot that is about 25 feet long and 10 feet wide. At the time I had absolutely no idea how much work it was to maintain that much space! I mean what was so hard about it? You plant, water, and enjoy the produce, right?
Not!
The truth of it was that the first summer was time consuming, laborious, tedious, repetitive, dirty, and exhausting. And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, I probably haven’t done it justice. But come mid-summer when things really start growing and you pick that very first sweet pea pod off the vine all those bad memories fade away. You forget about all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it… and savor the best sweet pea you think that you have ever had! To be fair, it really could be the most rotten pea pod ever, but you grew it from seed to vegetable… and it is damn good!
In all reality, that first year I really hated that garden. It seemed like one thing after another disappointed. We spent almost a whole weekend removing all of the grass (as we decided on a spot in the middle of the lawn for optimal sun / shade patterns), tilling the soil, hoeing it into rows, and fencing it off from the dog. That first weekend didn’t even include any of the planning or planting!
We did get the garden planted, we reaped the benefits, the next spring came and I had forgotten all about hard work. I was really excited to start that garden again. We had learned so much, tweaked some of our plans and got a new garden planted. It was amazing how much easier things were the second time around! And this year, with all of the knowledge I have from the past two years, I am confident that this year will be even better. We have learned tricks to cut down on the weeding time, learned about the best times for watering, optimizing plant output by appropriately pruning, and now we know what plants are best for our area and soil type. All in all, I am confident that Garden 2011 will be successful, and a relaxing hobby to enjoy. JThis year, I have decided to go a step further in my "not-so-urban" experiment. I finally took the plunge and purchased a chicken coop and will be bring fresh eggs into the mix. This seems to be a slightly less bloody way to get back in touch with raising my own meat or protein in this case. I don’t know that I would be able to kill a creature for food that was not a fish. It is difficult for me, as it is for most modern Americans, to look at another living animal as a slab of raw meat, so chickens for me are a way to satisfy that need without all the… guts.
For those of you that know Jordan and I, you most likely have heard us talk about Thomas Jefferson. We first were introduced to Jefferson by a radio program on NPR called the "Thomas Jefferson Hour". Jefferson had wanted the new United States to become more of an agrarian society. He ran a self sufficient farm and was quite the farmer. Jefferson was also fastidious man. He kept a multiple journals in which he would take notes on everything; weather conditions, planting notes, pruning notes, general farm notes, correspondence notes… do I need to continue?
Jefferson has inspired me… these are going to be my notes. I am going to write (hopefully on at least an every other day basis) about my agrarian conquests in my city home. I am embarking on my "not-so-urban" experiment.
"A Jeffersonian resists the dependencies of modern life; at least in some symbolic way." - Clay Jenkinson in ‘Becoming Jefferson’s People"