Is It Worth It to Grow Your Own Food If You Don't Know Much?

Posted on July 28, 2008 at 3:30 p.m. by Jill.

How Tim and I manage our backyard urban farm is how we manage our lives: imperfectly. Beekeeping manuals direct you to don your protective suit and open the hives once a week to inspect them and make sure the queen is alive. Tim checks our two hives once every two or three weeks, and in the four years we’ve had hives, he has yet to identify the queen.
I manage to feed and water the chickens and move their enclosure to a new patch of grass twice a day. But I haven’t yet painted their roost or covered the exposed sharp edges of chicken wire. I haven’t rearranged the interior of the roost to make it work better now that the hens are larger, nor have I yet clipped their wingtips so they can wander more freely around our yard.
As for the vegetable garden, I do my best with weed pulling, but by most people’s standards, my best is not too gorgeous. About a third of my spinach and lettuce bolts before I get around to harvesting it.
Yet in spite of our imperfection, things thrive. Tomato plants set fruit, the kale crop produces through November, and the radishes don’t care how many weeds are in the way, they just pop their little red tops up through the soil anyway.
Even our inadequate garden is bountiful. I hope others may find inspiration in this lesson. The fact is, even if you do a crummy job of planting vegetables and maintaining them, they make food for you, and the food tastes sublime. And when I go out to harvest, the weed-surrounded tomato is NOT giving me a reproachful glare. The tomato didn’t expect anyone to remove its competition, the weeds. For a plant, competition is par for the course. The tomato is just relieved that it survived to make its version of healthy babies, its seed-laden fruit.
Sometimes it's better not to know too much about what you're getting into. Just plant. The rest will follow.