Let Us Eat Lettuce: DIY Gardening on the Cheap!

What are my qualifications for giving you gardening advice?  What are my qualifications for anything?  Well, I’ll offer some, and you decide whether the advice is worth taking.

First, my goals in the “Let Us Eat Lettuce” project are threefold:
(1) To write and publish a children’s book series–with additional detail and video available on the blog, of course–on growing different plants for edible consumption, using sustainable, genuinely organic methods, and as much free, re-used, and recycled supplies as possible.
(2) Related to #1:  to NOT start a line of products or sell you anything, besides the books, should you find them useful or inspiring!
(3) To never give you instructions or advice that I have not vetted myself.

I grew up in New York City, the great-granddaughter of peasant immigrants from Italy (Naples and Sicily) and Ireland (Monaghan and Fermanagh).  My ancestors distanced themselves from agriculture as quickly as possible, the longest holdout being my dearest Nana, who told her grandkids many stories of growing up and working, working, working, on a produce farm on Staten Island (really!) that existed until the land was taken under eminent domain to build the Staten Island Expressway.  I don’t think she meant to inspire us to become food growers ourselves; rather, the stories were meant to teach us how good we had it (true, generally) and to share some of her past (priceless). While I completely understand why the arrival of cheaper, higher quality canned goods and the supermarket in general must have seemed like heaven for a woman who scalded chickens and helped preserve many winters’ worth of food, all before graduating high school (now there’s another story:  while extremely intelligent, she managed to do this only because she was the sole sister YOUNGER than the family’s one brother.  The other five contributed to his high school and college education, some by leaving school themselves to find wage work to do so.  This was another set of stories that she and her sister/my daycare provider told me to teach me how lucky I was, and I got it, I got it!), nonetheless the urge to grow something green–and, even better, to eat it–wasn’t completely washed out of her children and grandchildren.  To satisfy my Mom’s itch to garden, my inventive Dad built a fence/container garden on the south side of our yard, and by the beginning of college (for me) I was participating in the generation and maintenance of a nice, little summer garden yielding tomatoes, greens, and whatever other goodies we could muster.  Handily, I got home in May, in time to plant starts and water diligently, but leaving for school in August rather cut my harvesting time short.  With any luck there was some surviving arugula in the beds when I returned home again in December…

Finishing college and starting graduate school overseas (by the way:  the terminal degree is in Modern Latin American History; undergraduate degrees in History with a Spanish minor, also enough credits for a Studio Art minor and just about enough for a German minor, but I never went through with adding those) took me away from this project, but fortunately, the plant-loving cultures of the United Kingdom and Mexico encouraged me to keep puttering with at least a little bit of soil in a few containers.  I grew enough basil on my rooftop in Colonia Portales in Mexico City to keep my roommate and I in pesto for our year of doctoral research there.  A spider plant plus an African violet mailed to Oxford from a tremendously green-thumbed dear friend at the University of Nottingham grew into a miniature landscape that in habited the generous windowsill of each room at “The Convent” where I lived for the latter part of my studies in Oxford.  Several kind landlords let me dig a bit in their respective backyards in Washington, DC while I finished my dissertation, adjunct teaching, and working at an adult education center, so I could at least have a few jalapenio and serrano peppers to call my own, along with a few (legal) herbs.  Finally obtaining full-time university work teaching history (ten years hence I still realize how incredibly fortunate I have been), I moved to a three-flight walk-up apartment in Utica, NY, which sent me back to indoor container gardening–by the time I could get down to the yard of the building, in which I did have permission to try to plant something, the local bunnies made off with it.

So, I had to wait to meet the love of my life, my spouse and gardening partner (you’ll be hearing more about him and our garlic entrepreneurship–as my somewhat bewildered dissertation supervisor called my more active endeavor these days–soon), to get serious about gardening again.  When deciding to get married, we ascertained that he owned a house, and I didn’t, so that settled where we were going to live.  The teeny house sat on an acre of land in a town of 3,000–this would have been more of a culture shock for someone who grew up in NYC and lived in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and DC, among other places, had I not been so busy trying to get tenure (happy news:  after six years, I did).  Actually I found that I liked being in a small town, and after a pretty pathetic first attempt to garden as we were “courting,” we bought a copy of  The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, dug up about 100 square feet of the backyard (by hand–first and last time we did that!), and planted some seeds…

Eight years, three tractors, and the purchase of a 10-acre piece of land with an 1817 farmhouse on it (a huge work in progress, but it has a kitchen that is the size of those in my dreams…it may take decades to renovate and furnish, but it will be worth it) later, we find we can grow enough vegetables to keep us in fresh greens from May through early winter (depends how soon it gets *really* cold around here–we don’t have a hoop house, yet); quarts of canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and salsa, plus a year’s supply of dried tomatoes; at least a two-year supply of canned (water-pack and pickled) peppers and relish; several hundred pounds of potatoes; our own green herbs (fresh in season, frozen, and dried); and lots of garlic, among other things, while at the same time holding down a full-time job as a history professor* and a bus driver, respectively. We also have two future farmhands, currently both under the age of five.  We don’t houseclean very often, and yes, we are sleep-deprived, but we have hearts of gold!

“How do you manage to do all that?,”  and “How did you learn to grow X?,” some have asked–the answer is, by reading up on it, trying it, and making many mistakes along the way.  Getting back to the Let Us Eat Lettuce project (remember that?), my hope is that, as I teach my own little ones the joys of growing edible plants on one’s own, which can be done sustainably and resourcefully (i.e. only minimal outlays for specialized equipment), that I can share some of that knowledge with others and encourage them–even those of you still in those big, beautiful cities–to give it a try.

* I joined the Interdisciplinary Studies program at SUNYIT  (which otherwise does not have a history major, but has enough course offerings in history and research methods to keep me busy and enough interested students, regardless of their majors, to keep me happy) and as such began teaching the “IDS 103 Science, Technology, and Human Values” course in 2004.  One of my favorite colleagues and I developed a “Food” theme for the course, and after several years of delightful readings and discussions, in 2011 I got the class involved in a service-based learning project to grow tomato and pepper seedlings for a community garden (see the “Growing Solutions” blog my intern kept).  This was a successful and dangerously addicting endeavor–as I am offering the class again as the blog begins (Spring Semester 2013) you may be hearing more about this year’s students’ gardening learning curve as well!