In a futile effort to atone for their sins of bulldozing 1000 year old 170 bushel an acre cornfields to build their beige tract homes where they force feed the ground gallon after gallon of chemical death sludge in order to make it grow a worthless crop of inedible green grass, many suburban homeowners who live in places named "White Oak Trails" or "Grey Fox Woods" till over a tiny portion of their 1/3 acre yards and plant vegetable gardens so that come harvest time their kids can ignore a parade of tomatoes and cucumbers in favor of polyethylene tubes of frozen yogurt-like paste. I don't feel the need to plant a garden myself, probably because I own a decent sized place in the country where I put out food plots for the wildlife I eventually kill and eat. In a way it is a lot like eating vegetables from my garden apart from the fact that I let the deer and rabbits convert my vegetables to meat first.
But I still get a lot of food straight from the garden. My coworkers drag it in by the armload. These people couldn't pick a white oak or grey fox out of a Crate & Barrel catalog, but they find that gardening helps them maintain a connection with the earth. In the spring it might seem like a good idea to put out a dozen Beefsteak tomato plants alongside the same quantity of bell pepper plants. Come fall they get burned out by about the second fresh tomato and go back to eating Cheez Whiz on Pop Tarts and start looking for someone to take all their produce off their hands.
Every day I walk into the break room and see a new load of vegetables with a "Free" sign on them. I haul off fresh jalapenos by the pocketful. Onions by the sack. Sweet corn, thai chiles, bell peppers of all colors, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, squash, green beans. A massive bounty of fresh food. I eat like a king without having to pull a single weed.
I haven't been to the grocery store in a month. A turkey that couldn't resist my calls this spring and a couple of rabbits my dogs brought around have provided the much needed protein. A guy I don't know in Purchasing pitched in all the rest. If someone here would get some chickens and someone else learn how to grow wasabi I might not ever have to go to the store again.
Inspiration
