Eating Green

When I was 16, my parents bought an old one-room schoolhouse in rural (i.e. middle-of-nowhere) Vermont, and my family spent the next three summers living there. Having previously lived my entire life in a big city, I thoroughly enjoyed my immersion into such a completely different culture. Our neighbors in Vermont were mostly people who had lived in the country since they were born, who couldn't imagine ever living in the city we returned to each fall, and whose connection to the earth and the seasons I found enviable (and who themselves thoroughly enjoyed watching us "city folk" take a turn at country living; my mother quickly gained notoriety after using a vacuum to clean out the chicken coop). One of the things I was most struck by, the first summer we lived there, was the fact that everyone had a vegetable garden, and the success of one's garden was valued above most everything else during the growing season. The harvest determined not only what people would be eating that summer, but during the dark, dreary, and cold fall and winter that followed.

Running into people driving by (we lived on a dirt road that was also a highway, so we got a decent amount of "just passing through" visitors) or at a party (of which there were many since not a summer day went wasted after such a long, anti-social winter), the standard greeting was not, "how are you?" or "how have you been?" but rather, "how is your garden?" Friends who stopped by would always opt to take themselves on a tour of my mother's raised beds, and would comment on how certain crops were doing and compare the growth to that of their own vegetable plants.

This summer is the first summer that Lena and I have even attempted to have our own vegetable garden. For the past few years, we've opted to join local CSAs, and figured that adding home-grown vegetables to the bounty we picked up each week would be overkill (and it likely would have been). But this year we resisted the temptation to buy a share (as much as we would love to be supporting local farmers in that way), and instead planted a small garden full of our favorite crops. The garden--like most everything in our lives besides our children--has been rather neglected as of late, but it is still providing us with all sorts of yumminess in spite of our lack of commitment.

The other night we treated ourselves to a very green dinner, most of which--the peas, broccoli, lettuce and cucumbers--came directly from our garden (the delicious spanakopita was made by our friend Hannah who used local spinach and delivered it to our door, and we ate it two nights in a row).

To up the green quotient of this dinner even more,
we ate our plates of green, green food
outside in the green, green grass.

Our peas have pretty much gone by now, but we've still got lots of broccoli, lettuce, cucumbers, and basil ready for the picking, and the tomatoes and peppers aren't far off. We are quite pleased with how our introductory garden is growing, especially given the very small amount of energy that we've put into it. We're hoping that we never have another summer without a garden, and that the amount of food we can provide for ourselves each summer simply grows with each passing year.

How about you? How is your garden growing?