Dabbling in self-sustainability. . .

Last year, we started backyard gardening. It was more of an experiment, with our primary focus on providing the Os with a fun, outdoor learning experience. Whatever produce we were able to harvest would have been CF icing on the GF/CF/SF/EF cake. Thanks to poor location choice for planting many of the seedlings and seeds and most frustratingly, our local zucchini bandits, we did not get any real harvest from our garden last summer. You can read more about our 2008 gardening adventures in the April 10 edition of the Orange Cat.

In the course of the past year, I have become intrigued with the concept of urban farming and have realized the significance of working toward being more self-sustainable. I'm not interested in urban farming as a money-making endeavor, though that is an intriguing idea. It's hardly feasible in our yard which is mostly shaded by very old (but beautiful!) oak trees for a good potion of the day. There are only a few patches of our yard that receive, at best, six to eight hours of sunlight on any given day. Not to mention my novice gardening skills.

This summer, we are using the backyard garden as a fun and natural learning experiment again. But, we are expanding on that experiment to include more focus on actually generating fruits and vegetables to help reduce our dependence on produce from other parts of the country and from other countries. Thanks to the climate in Southern California, I expect we'll be able to enjoy some fall and winter crops as well.

To date, we have already enjoyed about 4 or 5 strawberries from our strawberry plant from the farmers' market. Some day, I hope to create a little in-ground strawberry patch and have a larger harvest of one of the Os' favorite fruits. We've also enjoyed one salad with a couple of handfuls of mesculin mix from the back yard garden and some dandelion greens.

It's still early in the season, but our observations to date indicate that we may be on the right track for a successful harvest this year. If we can stave off the zucchini bandits and other four-legged thieves, we might even have enough harvest to share some with our neighbors and to preserve some to enjoy later in the year.