How It All Started
Four years ago I knew very little about gardening, landscaping, let alone growing food. What got me started was the dire need to improve the front yard of our home. It was bad, really bad. There wasn’t anything much but overgrown Bermuda grass (the bane of my gardening life) and dandelions. It looked so dumpy that urban dwellers were mistaking it for a convenient spot to drop all manner of their garbage. Common variety litter is bad enough in the city but this…we had the scattered beer bottles, we were just missing a scrubby park bench and a dirty blanket to go with it.My husband (Dipak) and I had just been through a stressful move and the tension was a bit thick in the house so I decided to focus my energy on improving the exterior of the house while he worked on the interior. Things started with learning about landscaping focal points, textures, colors, and seasonality. In Oakland I have the fortune of a progressive city wide waste management program called Stop Waste. They send their residents information on Bay-Friendly gardening which got me thinking about drought resistant and native plants that would less maintenance. They also offered a nice compost bin and a complimentary video called “Do The Rot Thing” about composting. Tongue-in-cheek name aside, it was actually really helpful for a person that had never composted before and had a life partner in fear of what composting might attract to the yard.
As an aside, Dipak always tells me about how back in Texas (beware of “back in Texas” stories) he tried composting in back of his restaurant but it smelled bad and attracted too many flies. Dallas apparently wasn’t offering their residents educational videos on how to compost.
So I started by clearing the blight of our front yard by mowing so I could see the ground and creating a path.
I decided to create a woodsy, slightly untamed, look befitting to the owners in more ways than one.
However, it was when I rounded the corner to the side with fruit trees that the idea of food happened.
Between the organic goodness of compost and the promise of fruit from a peach tree and a Meyer lemon tree, I was inspired. I decided the side would be an “orchard” of sorts with each sectioned area having its own fruit tree. I added in a fig tree to make the trilogy complete. Whisked away with the romantic notion of growing food, I randomly planted some vegetables. I selected tomatoes because all gardeners have tomatoes, right? An artichoke because I had actually seen this in a garden before; and broccoli because, well, its simple unassuming broccoli.
Then the darndest thing occurred. I had absolutely no idea how to recognize when they were ready, the trickiest being broccoli. Who doesn’t know what broccoli looks like in its raw unpicked form? Turns out a better question is, who does? Could it be that I was so accustomed to plastic wrapped food that I myself was unable to distinguish a simple ordinary broccoli? The answer, yes. My own ignorance of what food was blew me away. I, who proclaimed to love and value food, real food, whole food, did not even seem to know what it was. So there is was. I needed to know broccoli and all the other common foods out there whose complexity and needs I knew nothing about. I needed to learn to grow food.
