Homegrown Dirt.
My dad’s family is from a very rural area of Kentucky. Even though we lived in suburban Atlanta, he would sometimes speak fondly of keeping chickens or wanting a goat, which my mom would quickly veto. Mostly, he was joking, but I think that some part of him missed the self-sufficiency of country life.
Growing up in a large metro area, recycling, composting, and home gardening were things that only “out there” hippies did. I got the impression that it was really difficult and inconvenient, and indicated something about my lifestyle or political standing. Despite all that, I would often daydream about picking vegetables from the garden for lunch, planting bulbs, and finding uses for all the things we regularly threw away.
In the country, these activities were not political statements, they were just a way of life. It was practical and necessary to re-use whatever you could, to feed the plants with coffee grounds and to do as much as you could on your own just in case the power went out or the money stopped coming in. Gardening wasn’t for hippies, it was for people who had any lick of sense.
My Uncle Jim had a great vegetable garden that I wish I had spent more time in. When we were up in Kentucky I had lots of outside space to run around in, tomato plants to look at and touch, and dirt to wiggle my fingers in…but back in Atlanta, when vacation was over, it seemed like a faraway concept. Our condominium had about 3 square feet of “yard” and planting anything edible was not allowed by the homeowner’s association.
Needless to say, when we talked about moving up to the Little Green House, one of the very first things out of my mouth was “We can have a GARDEN!”
Last weekend, we took the first step toward that dream of picking our lunch from the backyard. We decided to create a compost container out of an old trash bin that was not being used. It is a variant on the “tumbler” model of composter, but much cheaper and pretty darn easy to do. In the next post I will describe how we did it in case you want to try it for your own yard!
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