From My Garden to Yours

Farms take space. Utter the word “farm,” and most everyone will picture vast acreages of monocrop agriculture undulating across broad sweeps of North America’s prairies or California’s Imperial Valley. The iconic image of the red barn, the family’s house, tractors, fencing, even some livestock lolling about would still be the first pick from a lineup of the usual rural suspects. Although commercial profit and economy of scale concern most definitions of a farm, the stereotype boils down to something more simple: growing crops to be eaten. Each of us can farm some of our own food (and save some money at the grocery store). So let’s build our farms, no matter how small, to be as productive and profitable as possible!

Any crop production facility combines plant genetics with area, light, growing medium, time and moisture. Determining resource availability that combines all these components in the most lucrative scheme possible is our job as farmers. Growing alfalfa sprouts on a Chia Pet brings this whole institution down to its elemental form.

Summer is the off-season for growing crops in Central Florida, so now is a good time to create infrastructure. Tilling up some sod in the backyard for the garden may seem like the next logical step in growing some of our own food, but we do not need to commit to so large an endeavour. Pace out an area with some sun, access to a garden hose, tolerance to mud and convenient approach to the kitchen, and you have your own farm. Storage of equipment and supplies is accomplished in weatherproof plastic bins. Don’t forget to bring social comfort to the farm with some seating and a work table.

Defining the parameters of our farms to a given place helps to corral impractical goals. We all love asparagus, but including in our farm a perennial crop that is not recommended for our climate borders on whimsical risk. With almost no relative effort, a few 3-gallon pots of soil in the space allotted for that asparagus will grow all the basil most families need for a year. Space a few smaller containers of garlic chives between the basil and the companionship forms the foundations of a garden pesto. In the same boundaries, sneak in a planting of French sorrel, and the previously unobtainable is now commonplace.

The slippery slope of this enterprise accelerates our desires to the point of discarding exotic landscape trollops. Once food production amenities are surmounted, the love of farming is fated. No wonder so many farmers continue in their chosen careers facing very uncertain economic futures.