My Superbackyard

If you walk out into my back yard, the first thing you'll see is my garlic patch. It's the pride and joy of the back yard, the only thing that seems to be growing well. It is not to be outdone however, by the courageous collard green that is growing, against all odds, in the winter shade of our southern fence. Last evening I was kicking around, cleaning out the frozen marigolds and tomato plants, depressed at the thought of the one meal that collard plant would provide. Not even a whole meal, a third of one meal, as payment for my exertions in the heat of august. I was annoyed that my sugar snaps had, in the past 4 months, offered exactly one blossom. That's exactly one sugar snap pea, not exactly a positive impact on the grocery bill. I considered giving it all up and putting in some hedges I'd never have to fool with again.

Today I've regained some of my idealism. I walked out in the tender morning sun to see that my little Calemondin Orange had perked up from last night's doldrums in response to a watering. I thought about my bay bush and how I needed to give my mother some of the leaves for Christmas so she can cook with them. I thought, what if everyone in this town put in a zuchinni each summer? What if everyone had a little dill and parsley in a pot next to their kitchen? What if everyone took out a pine tree and replaced it with a pear tree or satsuma?

Let's go even further. Every poor neighborhood in America, every government housing project, ought to plant exclusively fruit trees. It is idiotic, when considering the nutrition problems we face as a country, not to consider this obvious solution. Why do they put in an azalea when they could put in a blueberry instead? Every town where their are hungry people could be transformed into the garden of Eden.

It seems to me that most people in modern America have become so removed from any form of the agrarian lifestyle, that they cannot even concieve of producing their own food. They cannot imagine actually touching the dirt from which their carrots and potatoes come. They no longer actually realize that their potato came out of the dirt at all. I'm reminded of my friend Wendy's 5-year-old son Nathan who vehemently refused to eat the popcorn I made for him on the stove because he had only ever eaten it out of a microwave bag. This broken conceptual link probably makes it incredibly easy for people to trash the place without any sense of the consequences. It also makes it easy for most people to think that the only way to get food is to buy it. As a result, people subconsciously imbue money with the power to feed and sustain them instead of the earth. This misappropriation of the power to produce from the earth to human wealth is extended nowadays to every other product Americans consume now that manufacturing is almost nonexistant in this country.

I miss alot of things about the city I used to inhabit. I miss the culture, the sense of being part of a teeming organism, the variety of people and activities. But one thing the city doesn't have, one thing I love about semi-rural southern Alabama, is the awareness among the average person, of the ability to produce food. Half the people I know here have some kind of citrus tree in their yard. Our proximity to the bay makes fresh-caught fish a common luxury. The drive to my job at a farm took me past cotton and peanut fields and farm markets whose offerings changed with the seasons. I believe that when the inevitable happens- some serious economic crisis that severely affects our fuel-dependent food supply-places like this will fair most successfully. I also believe that, in the mean time, my little collard green and handful of garlic is a step in the right direction. It's a tiny dent in my grocery bill, that, multiplied by every person in this country who has room to grow some kind of food (everybody) could make a huge difference in the way food (and every other good) is distributed in this country. It is a tiny step toward ending the dirty little secret of American life: that we don't and don't know how to produce anything of value for ourselves, a deficiency which leads, no doubt to the histeria of imperialist war and the willful ignorance of a distribution system that causes so much suffering around the world.

So I'm an idealist again and tommorrow I'll plant some e. coli-free spinach where the marigolds used to be.