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Rewards of a home vegetable garden

On Friday, first lady Michelle Obama dug into a new project.

With the help of about two dozen fifth graders, she started a 1,100-square-foot White House vegetable plot.

She said she was doing it to focus attention on better nutrition, but it would be hard to ignore the environmental implications that gardening advocates have touted with increasing fervor lately.

Local is the word. Buy from a grocery, and food comes from far and wide. There are local farmer’s markets and CSAs - Community Supported Agriculture farms that sell memberships for regular pickups.

But for the ultimate in local, grow your own.

I’ve grown vegetables for three decades. But never have I quantified just what went into it - the time and money, mostly, but also the angst of insects and rainfall.

Nor what I got out of it.

This year, I plan to do just that, and detail the adventure as “The Veggie Chronicles” within my GreenSpace blog.

Based on history alone, I have high hopes. Last year, our tomatoes were so productive my husband was hauling 15-pound baskets into the house. By summer’s end, we had maybe 25 gallons of tomato sauce, 40 quarts of pickles.

I’m no expert, and technically, my garden isn’t organic, although I avoid chemicals. So it’s probably an example of what an average person can do.

W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the Warminster seed company, has a “money garden,” offering a $10 pack of six seed varieties that it says will yield $650 worth of veggies.

That may be optimistic. “They probably had some diligent employees” tending the test garden, noted Bruce Butterfield, research director of the National Gardening Association (NGA).

He recently estimated that the average 600-square-foot garden can yield 300 pounds of produce worth $600 - for a $70 outlay.

Writing in the online Kitchen Gardeners International, Maine gardener Robert Doiron estimated that he and his wife, Jacqueline, spent $282 on seeds and supplies last year - including water - and harvested 834 pounds of food, worth $2,431.

Whatever the presumed bounty, the NGA anticipates a nearly 20 percent increase in household vegetable gardens this year - an increase of seven million homes.

My husband and I have lots of garden space - a main plot of about 1,600 square feet. Add in “Squash Hill,” 10 blueberry bushes plus tubs on the patio, and we probably have 2,000 square feet. I’ll do the final measurement when we get it all dug up.

We started poring over the seed catalogs in January, going for peas, string beans, limas, chard, okra, and more. In the end, we spent $140.86.

I’m embarrassed by this excess, especially if part of the point is to show how much - for how little - you can get out of a backyard garden.

But the seed catalog descriptions, as usual, got to me. I love eggplant, so how could I resist the succulent promises of the exotic lavender Rosa Bianca (”creamy and tender”), Listada de Gandia (”gorgeous . . . heavy producer”) or Bianca di Imola (slice, rub with garlic, brush with olive oil . . .).

So, heh-heh, I ordered seven eggplant varieties, a $21.33 extravagance.

In contrast, the pack of broccoli seeds was $1.25, a bargain! I have 10 plants sprouted in a sunny dining room window, along with leeks, cabbage, bok choi, brussels sprouts and chard.

Even if all I get is two clumps of broccoli, two dinners worth, I’m ahead of the game. On Friday, broccoli was on sale at my local grocery for $1.99 a pound. Given that most of the broccoli grown in the United States comes from California, my garden has a 3,000-mile edge, with goodness knows how much less in transportation fuel and global warming emissions.

Not to mention that our produce is the freshest possible. Last summer, we were eating tomatoes picked 10 minutes earlier. The squash went from plant to grill to mouth in less than half an hour.

Meanwhile, the peas are in the ground. I’ve sprouted lettuce in egg cartons and it’s in pots out back, protected by mini-greenhouses (old plastic juice jugs) when night temperatures dip into the 20s.

Any day now, we’ll have a baby greens salad.
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March 24th, 2009 | Tags: home vegetable garden, michelle obama, vegetable plot | Category: Uncategorized | Comments Off

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