by Susan Tweit
What if you could walk out into your yard and pick a sun-warmed tomato, dripping with juice, for lunch? What if the hardest part of deciding what to cook for dinner was choosing from the box of just-harvested produce delivered to your door?
What if most of your vegetables and fruits were grown right in your own neighborhood, instead of traveling an average of 1,500 miles to reach your table?
What if your kids clamored to pick their snacks from backyard rows of sugar snap peas, easter-egg radishes, and baby ball carrots? What if you could open the freezer and pull out summer-preserved packages of local produce all year long?
These are the promises of the local food movement’s newest sprout: backyard farms.
No matter if you can’t tell a tomato plant from a potato, chives from corn, or if your green thumb is really… brown. If you’ve got space in your yard for a few rows of vegetables, or if you have a few hours a month to tend a nearby yard, you could eat from a community-supported backyard farm.
The idea of community-supported agriculture is pretty simple: People who want fresh produce but can’t grow their own can buy shares in a farm entitling them to a weekly portion of the harvest.
It’s a win-win model. Small farmers get cash upfront to nourish their balance sheet and additional hands for cultivation and harvest; consumers get fresh, local produce, including tasty heirloom varieties not available commercially.
But farmland is becoming increasingly expensive and the water to irrigate it increasingly scarce, while we’re surrounded with cultivatable space in town.
Hence the new backyard agriculture movement, which moves the farms to where most of the people live.
In this model, the farm is no longer confined to a single location; instead, it’s distributed across the available space in a neighborhood or community, ranging from a few raised beds in one yard to a whole lot bursting with vegetables, flowers, herbs, and fruit.
Those with space in their yards allow farmers use it to grow edible crops; in return, the backyard owners get shares in the produce of the network of yard-sized farms.
If you don’t have cultivatable space, you can still benefit from this most local of food production by volunteering to help. Spend a few hours a month with your hands in the soil, digging beds, weeding, planting, tending, and harvesting in return for a steady supply of fresh food.
It’s good exercise, and a great excuse to get your family outside. Research shows that such gardening activities yield other benefits, ranging from lowered blood pressure to increased production of “feel-good” brain chemicals.
And since we are what we eat, our cells continually replaced by new ones made from the nutrients in our food, consuming the products of our local sunlight and soil makes us truly a part of the places where we live, down to our bones.
(For information about Salida’s fledgling backyard CSA, call Eric Belsey at 719- 207-0069 or email: egbelsey@yahoo.com.)
Copyright 2009 Susan J. Tweit. Originally published in the Salida Mountain Mail.
Award-winning writer and commentator Susan J. Tweit lives and gardens in Salida when she’s not on the road promoting her new memoir, Walking Nature Home, which inspired one reviewer to write, “You simply must read this book.”
