Tuesday, July 15, 2025

The truth of the matter

This is the sixty-ninth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Please take a moment to pray for the victims of the recent Texas floods, and for all those affected by natural disasters recently.

In On Good Soil, one of the reasons Jason Craig gives for families wanting to start a homestead and go back to the land is to teach the children how food is made and where it comes from, instead of just believing that food appears at the grocery store with no intermediary steps. This was something that we wanted for our kids as well, and while we never got very far into the processing of animals into meat, we had already done quite a bit of vegetable processing by the time we got to Indiana at all.

In 2020 we got the crazy idea to start a backyard garden, and since we lived on a corner lot of nearly a quarter acre, this seemed like a reasonable plan. Except we didn’t just get a few raised beds or planter boxes, we went ahead and tore up every inch of grass and started a mini-vegetable farm.

Photo by the author

We grew everything that was remotely interesting and delicious: peas, radishes, carrots, kale, raspberries, beets, lettuce, spinach, sweet peppers, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, leeks, beans, onions, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, salsify, turnips, parsnips, okra, watermelons, cantaloupes, strawberries, ground cherries, and lots of different kinds of herbs. We ate a lot of it and froze the rest, without ever doing any canning. The neighbors probably thought we were crazy trying to do all of that in the hot, dry Idaho climate, but we not only tried, we succeeded.

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

That required a lot of work, though, including weeding over 12 garden beds, and running a drip irrigation system that needed to be cleaned every day to stay in operation. The kids saw how much work went into each tomato and raspberry that we enjoyed, and got to compare that to the corn, wheat, and sugar beet fields that were right next to our neighborhood. Sadly no potatoes, most of those are grown in Eastern Idaho.

So, you can still teach your children (or yourself) about the truth of fruits and vegetables just by planting something simple. Start with radishes and lettuce in a pot, or get a few raspberry canes from the home improvement store and give them a wet spot to thrive. You’d be surprised how much you can get with just a little bit of ground.

Reply

or to participate.