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Eight dollar tomatoes and free range chickens
How does your garden grow? A family friend suggested a column about gardening. She doesn’t really know me very well. But here’s my take on raising plants.
I’ve been on the horns of a dilemma for a few weeks. Actually, as soon as winter turned into spring, I’ve been giving this more than a little bit of headspace. In the past, LOML and I have played host to vegetable plants in our yard. Most of those plants were tomatoes or peppers, but still, we had a veggie garden of sorts. Once, we even grew a pumpkin, accidentally. Who knew a pumpkin could happen in a compost pile from the guts of the previous year’s Jack-o- Lantern?! The thing is, when our children left the nest LOML and I suddenly had more time to travel. And, travel we did. Sometimes, we’d be gone for weeks at a time. Tending a garden doesn’t happen if you’re gallivanting around the globe. And, oh, how we loved to gallivant. Around the time of those gallivanting days someone wrote about the economic reality of growing of a few tomato and pepper plants. As it turns out, a garden fresh tomato was worth about as much as that strip loin steak on the backyard grill. You know, the steak to which the tomato was to be a side dish? Oh, those eight dollar tomatoes! Obviously, we had to look at whether our type of vegetable production was really a project for people who wanted to keep costs down or for people who wanted to have the satisfaction of growing a vegetable (and, yes I know a tomato is a fruit). To that end, (and up until that point) LOML and I were happy to buy our produce at local farm stands and continue to travel. And then?
Well, and then the second summer of the pandemic seems to be looming on the horizon. LOML and I still have time to gallivant, but we are homebound by travel restrictions. It actually looks like we have time to spend tending a vegetable patch and, because we haven’t spent money on travelling, we can afford to grow an eight dollar tomato or two. I believe having a lawn is a huge waste of time and money, but it’s cheaper to have a lawn than to tend a garden, if you do the tomato math. At least that’s what I tell myself. So, now that the grass is greening up, I have accepted the reality of my skillset. I’m about as talented as a greenskeeper as I am a vegetable farmer. Which is to say, “I’m not very good at plants.” I put the burden of gardening squarely on my own shoulders since I’m the only one in this relationship who really gives a small gosh-squash-darn about what happens in the yard. Oh yeah, LOML prefers a green yard over a brownish wasteland but he’d certainly be okay if I said we should dig it all up and cover the lot with gravel. We’ve often laughed about green pavement being our lawn of choice.
So, I can hear my salad clock ticking. I have to decide in the next few days if I’ve accepted the fact travelling is off our agenda for another year and then to decide if edible gardening is in my future. A smart friend told me I should have a plan for a veggie garden. This is news to me. I see nothing wrong with twenty, eight dollar tomatoes popping-up at the same time. We either eat tomatoes for three meals a day or they get squished and bagged for the freezer. Same thing for peppers, if I recall, all of the peppers I’ve ever planted were ready for picking on the same day. Maybe I do need a plan. If you know me, and some of you really think you do, you know I am more a spur of the moment kinda gal than a planning kinda gal. I know I can grow a mean batch of sourdough starter. However, having a few tomatoes and peppers in the freezer for the 2022 gallivanting season is tempting.
Maybe I’ll get just a few tomato plants and a couple of pepper plants. I can’t afford the wood for a new deck, but I believe I could manage a megabuck tomato and maybe a couple of pricey peppers. While I’m on the topic of food, maybe I should get a chicken? Do chickens need to be tended, or does free range really mean what I think it means?
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