When I was 9, my grandparents took my sister and me to visit friends of theirs in Phoenix, Arizona as part of a month-long swing through the western states. One morning they let us pick grapefruit and oranges from trees in their yard. Then they halved the grapefruit, squeezed the oranges into juice, and put them on the table for breakfast.
Although I’d eaten apples off a tree and tomatoes and strawberries from a garden, this was a thunderclap of culinary novelty! An entire meal, harvested for free, “farm to table.” Wow!
I’ve always gotten tremendous satisfaction from growing my own food. Oh, not much of it. Karen and I aren’t farmers living off the land. We have a small suburban yard with a smaller raised planting bed, but every season we fill it with basil and tomatoes to produce enough green pesto and red pasta sauce to last the rest of the year.
We’ve tried other crops: squash, beans, peppers. They’ve been hit and miss for us—usually miss. Tomatoes and basil are reliable and versatile.
You also have to account for what the neighbors are cultivating. We never need to grow zucchini or lemons because we can count on friends begging us to relieve them of their burden. It’s a nice hyper-local barter economy.
There is nothing like sitting down to dinner and saying, “This meal was in our garden this morning.” It tastes better, must be healthier, and feels like the way food should really be prepared.
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