How I became the smallest farmer in the Midwest
Gardeners are widely known as generous folks, eagerly giving away home-grown flowers and food to anyone who asks. The late-summer surfeit of produce often forces us to be extra-generous.
But this year, I took the exchange a step further. This year, I sold a good part of my harvest, making me arguably the smallest farmer in Midwest.
Unexpected harvests
Like any less-than-expert gardener, my vegetable patch generally turns out about 50 percent different than I planned.
This year, for instance, I wanted to try companion planting, so I sowed zinnias with my baby broccoli. An early heat wave murdered the broccoli, leaving the flowers to take over an entire bed. I now have enough to cover a .
The same mad, Murphy-esque method left me with an enormous sage plant but no potatoes to season with the herb; hundreds of grape tomatoes but only a handful of slicing ones; and an equal number of delicious but .
You could say I specialize in hard-to-eat crops.
Found: a solution
To buy all the ingredients I had failed to grow, I headed to a storefront grocery in my Chicago neighborhood, a friendly shop called . It鈥檚 a small operation run by young people that stocks a little bit of everything, including lots of local produce.
One day, bummed out by my inability to grow anything approaching a staple, I propositioned the store manager: "Would you like some flowers? For the store, I mean?" Darned if the answer wasn鈥檛 yes, with $5 of store credit as my reward.
Emboldened, I offered again and again. "Would you like some sage? Tomatoes?" I got only a few bucks per sale, but it felt like big sums because I had converted my produce into a few dollars.
Moreover, to learn that someone would buy my mistakes made me wonder what other oddly desirable things I could grow. Super-hot peppers? Decorative gourds? Pink peppercorns?
The booming interest in heirloom edibles has meant that seed houses are selling some truly obscure quasi-useful varieties that became rare for a reason. Invariably, they end up in my small plot.
I just planted marshmallow and . Place your orders now.
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Christopher Weber is a journalist and work-at-home dad in Chicago. He has written about gardening for the Chicago Tribune and taught it at a local school. His current favorite vegetable to grow is Brussels sprouts. You can find more information about him, including articles and blogs, at . To read more by Christopher at Diggin' It, click here.
