[conspire] gardening

[Rick Moen]

Paul, thank you for the compliment of assuming I grew up with a family
vegetable garden:  In fact, my family never had one.

One year in the 1980s, my former fiancee wanted to have an ~3 meter x 3
meter garden patch at our rental house in Concord, and the landlord was
fine with tearing up a hopelessly bad bit of rear lawn for that with a
tiller.  The garden did seem to effortlessly produce fantastic tomatoes,
and enough zucchini to meet the zucchini needs of Central Contra Costa
County.  I had to steal out at night and hurl excess zucchini onto
neighbours' lawns lest our entire property become one vast zucchini
herd.  I pleaded with bicycle clubs to hold more century rides so I
could give them more zucchini breads.

Oddly, we've been totally unable to grow the stuff here in Menlo Park.
I suspect the Peninsula breeds more-voracious snails.

That sad squash failure aside, the experience of gardening has been
amazing and magical -- even given that I have no real idea what I'm
doing.

For those who don't have space for a vegetable garden, or want to sample
things you don't happen to grow, I strongly recommend farmers' markets.
You'll wonder why you put up with food that wasn't really fresh and
didn't really taste right.

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/farmers-markets.html
(Probably needs to be re-researched, as things change.)