Developing Cherry Tomatoes
So, aside from my tropical plants and myriad of perennials, we’re also growing edibles: strawberries, peaches, blueberries, Italian grapes, Simpson and butter crunch lettuce, arugula, three kinds of peppers, carrots, spring onions, cukes, basil, cilantro, lemon balm, eggplant, stevia (that’s an experiment for iced tea’s sake), cantaloupe, heirloom tomatoes (and cherry and Roma). Get this nonsense: all of it is growing in our tiny front yard along with a host of butterfly, bee, and bird enticing perennials and annuals and of course our aforementioned gargantuan banana tree. I think that the urban garden is making a huge resurgence because I see my next door neighbors with their first attempt of a huge garden with raised beds. My good friend Pat has enough produce to feed her two meals a day in her side yard in Avondale. My commute through an adjacent neighborhood has raised beds in the tiny strip of land between sidewalk and street. What’s amazing is that passers-by have an intimate viewing (and potential picking) of this maximized footprint garden.
Jungle o’ Produce
Atlanta folks and I imagine folks around the country are listening to reports of pesticides, genetic engineering, and a desire for green living (how far does food have to travel to stay fresh?; how much fuel does it take to move it?; are they coating it in shellac to preserve it?) and are hitting their local nurseries to buy young plants and seeds.
My family’s lettuces, growing front and center in the front yard, have been thriving ridiculously and are actually stressing me out a bit. Even with the daily consumption of at least one salad (times three per day), we can’t keep up with the growth rate.
And so, we are giving bags of salads away to friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Even my cats have found the fresh buttercrunch worth noshing. We put the arugula on our attempts at creating the perfect Italian pie. And it’s cliché and rather bizarre that lettuce greens are far superior in flavor that the grocer’s wares. Everyone knows that’s true of tomatoes, but who would have thunk it of lettuces?
Our strawberries yield 3-4 fruits a day and it thrills my 6 year old daughter, Walker, that her plants are producing like mad. It’s a delight for her to arrive home from school and rummage the garden to check the growth the veggies and fruits. She knew, before me, that our cukes were already 6 inches long and that our heirloom tomatoes were producing. I was informed that she’s already harvested and consumed some banana peppers and that they were “quite delicious.” It warms the innermost cockles of my heart when she gives tours of our intimate garden to her play dates and informs them that everything is 100% organic.
So while the runaway lettuce stresses me out, I realize it’s a good problem to have–you can’t get much more local or organic than your own front yard!
