Am I Smarter Than a Potato?
(This essay was originally published in the now-incredibly-broken-beyond-repair “Late-Bloomer Blog”, in 2014.)
CAN I grow potatoes in a parking lot?
My big project for 2014 (aside from becoming “Independently Self-Sufficient”, that is) was to be able to feed the household without having to purchase any vegetable I could grow myself.
Actually, the garden was a major part of the “Independently Self-Sufficient” plan — I just knew damned well that I could only just begin the project this year. I could only plant the stuff and hope that in a year or two, I had learned enough and grown the garden large enough that we wouldn’t need to purchase items like tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and blueberries, melons, peas… you know — the kind of stuff that people around here manage to grow in sufficient amounts in their backyards.
My main concern was that gardeners around here have a big one-up on me.
They have dirt. They have places in their yards that they can dig holes in, and stuff green things in, and if the green things are properly nurtured (and sometimes totally ignored) these people can have a successful crop.
