Backyard Jungle

A $14 case of Schlitz was purchased as an anti-slug measure.

by Brian Howard

I wrote briefly two weeks ago about the movie Food, Inc., the documentary chronicling the myriad ways in which agribusiness is screwing not only the American eater, but American farmers who have become pawns in this high-stakes game.

The film (foodincmovie.com) concludes with a list of changes — small, big, easy, hard — people can make in their lives to counteract a system rigged to maximize profits but which also leaves a large chunk of those it serves sick or obese. One of the film's suggestions was "plant a vegetable garden ... even a small one."

It was already an emotional point in the film — one of the farmers featured had just begged Americans to demand healthier, more wholesome food so that he could, in turn, grow it — and I'll admit that I welled up because this summer for the first time in the 14 or so years I've lived in the city, I planted a tiny vegetable garden.

I'd long been enamored of my friend Char's tiny deck garden and its surprisingly substantial yield of all sorts of fruits and veggies — peppers to tomatoes to melons. (Char is an occasional contributor to these pages; read her excellent container gardening blog at plantsondeck.wordpress.com.) And watching our staff writer, Isaiah Thompson, build his own tomato and basil garden in coffee cans and Gatorade bottles on his office windowsill only fueled the notion.

It started, simply, with herbs. My girlfriend's mother bought her a preplanted set of potted herbs last summer, which we ultimately neglected. This May, however, we dug the dirt out of the big, bathtub-size concrete planter that is quite literally built into our tiny backyard (and which had, since I bought the place more than a year ago, been full of bad dirt, broken bricks, an inexplicable metal shot-put and oh so many slugs). We filled it planting soil, topsoil, humus and mulch. We went to Laurel Hill Garden Shop in Chestnut Hill and purchasedstarter plants of cilantro, parsley, romaine and red sail lettuces, lavender, creeping rosemary and, because the name sounded so cool, green comet broccoli. To our surprise, the stuff grew. We added basil, lemon thyme and mint, which also prospered. The only actual vegetable, the broccoli, wasn't producing any florets — a total broc tease — but the plant itself grew to a hulking 2 feet tall.

It was addicting. But we had three problems. One, we'd run out of room in the planter. Two, the growing season was fast coming to a close. Three, the slugs were amassing an army. Containers were called for: Multicolored $2 IKEA waste bins were procured and drilled for drainage; the clay pots from that first herb set were exhumed; cans that once held crushed tomatoes had holes punched in their bottoms. Butter lettuce, mesclun, carrot, cucumber, pea, tomato and corn seeds, stuff that might still have a chance of growing in July and August, were popped into the newly potted earth and sprouted quickly. A $14 case of Schlitz was purchased as an anti-slug measure. Meanwhile, back in the planter, the basil, cilantro, parsley and lettuces hadgone to seed; the rosemary and lemon thyme crept about laterallyas if engaged in a game of Risk. And the broccoli continued its pattern of growing ever taller and thicker, neither flowering norfloretting.

And then last weekend, while I was away visiting family in Michigan, the big monsoon rains came and when I returned, that broccoli — which I'd come this close to yanking out as a dud a week prior — was producing telltale bristly-bumpy florets. I'm not sure how big it'll get; and I'm honestly not banking on much of a yield from the tomatoes, cukes and carrots given how late in the season we planted, or the corn because just about everyone will tell you that you need a few rows of the stuff for it to really grow (we've got one plant, albeit in a stylish yellow Swedish-designed wastepaper basket). But even if this year's plantings yield little more than some fresh herbs, runt broccoli and some peas, we know a bit more for next year.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)

Got a backyard/rooftop/deck garden? E-mail me a picture and I'll post it on our staff blog, citypaper.net/clog.