The Modern Victory Garden

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

--Mahatma Gandhi                               

My professional life often necessitates long days at the office.   I also have other life responsibilities and personal pursuits that demand my time and attention periodically.   So how does that fit with a home food culture that revolves around meals that are largely made from scratch and feature produce from the garden?   It’s a question often posed to me by people who are truly interested in choosing to live a more simple and local food based life, but struggle with how to blend a modern (often fast paced) life with a slower and more time consuming approach to feeding ourselves and our families.   There is no “one size fits all” answer, but I would offer up the following observations based on my own experiences.   

Small Amounts of Work Done Frequently Vs. All or Nothing Work Marathons                        

I am the youngest of six children and my parents struggled financially to feed all of us and keep a roof over our heads when I was growing up.   They did sensible things to manage our family food supply given their limited resources – including growing a large garden every year.   What was not sensible was how they managed that effort.   In their defense, they were just doing what many other people did (and still do).   Each year there was the big “planting day”.   The large garden area was rototilled and then all of us went out and worked from sun up until we were dragging – planting absolutely everything for the garden season all at once.   This typically was done on mother’s day weekend, which was the designated safe day to plant for that area.   Everyone then largely ignored the garden except to occasionally run a sprinkler on it during dry spells.   A day would finally come though when my mother would declare, “the garden needs weeding”.   This of course was a laughable understatement because no one had touched the garden for weeks on end and it now more closely resembled a hay field than it did a vegetable patch.   Back out to the garden we were all marched, like chain gang prisoners on work duty, and toiled until exhaustion set in trying to set to right the weed infested garden.   This pattern of “all or nothing” work marathons continued throughout the garden season and into the harvesting and preserving.   I honestly wonder to this day how I ended up loving to vegetable garden as much as I do – given how much I absolutely came to dread these brutal workdays.                               

Despite these experiences I did keep up the practice of maintaining a home food production garden when I set up my first household as a young adult.   Thankfully I quickly learned that the garden was much easier to manage if small amounts of work were done on a more frequent and regular basis.   Cycling through the garden by small sections to do watering, light weeding, and other routine maintenance rather than doing all of the garden in one marathon day of work not only provided improved results from better overall management, but suddenly gardening was actually a pleasurable activity.   Who knew?!                            

To this day, the only time I ever really feel a little overwhelmed by the garden and related tasks, is when I end up banking up routine tasks because travel or other matters keep me away from the garden for a prolonged period of time.   What works best is to have the garden be a regular part of our every day lives (all through the year) and to do smaller amounts of work on a much more frequent basis.        

The practicality of my professional life though, is that there are some days during the work week where I am lucky if I can do a fly by look at the garden as I race out the door in the morning.   Similarly, there are usually several evenings each workweek where it is impossible to get home at an early enough hour to do anything productive outside and often even restricts how much time and effort is possible for the evening meal preparation.   Not every day is like that though.   I manage to do a morning garden “walk about” several times during the week.   It only takes about 10 minutes of my time; is a calming way to start the day; and I usually take care of one or two small items while I am at it.   On the evenings I do manage to get home at a reasonable hour, I harvest items and do other simple chores.   Bigger projects and work efforts I save for when I have a larger block of time available on the weekend.                                   

Use What Time You Do Have As Efficiently as Possible                 

It is truly amazing what I do manage to get done in the limited time I may have available on any given day.   For example, often before I do an evening harvest, I will start a soaker hose running in the garden - setting the simple manual timer on the spigot to turn the water off after two hours has elapsed.   I then go on to do some harvesting, weigh and photograph the produce, cook and enjoy a nice dinner, tidy up the kitchen, do some laundry, edit and upload digital photos, do a blog update or other tasks that need doing etc.   Eventually I end up popping back outside to turn the water completely off, usually in conjunction with shutting the chicken door on the coop and checking on the hens to make sure they are all safely in for the night.   If for some reason I should get distracted and don’t actually return to manually shut off the spigot – no worries because the timer will take care of that for me.            

Another efficiency step I like to take is to do preserving efforts in larger groups and by processing multiple items in the same work effort.   This is an exception to the “small amounts of work on a more frequent basis vs. marathon work efforts” concept discussed above, but it works for me.   The reason it works is that a large part of the time spent in processing garden produce for freezing or canning - is the setting up and putting away of necessary equipment and supplies, cleaning up the mess created, and actual prepping of the produce.   If I can get more done each time I do set up and take down work, and then establish a kind of assembly line approach to the produce preparation – I can reduce the overall amount of time spent on food preservation activities.   Once I have the kitchen in chaos, the pots of water boiling, and all the supplies out, I just want to do as much as possible so I don’t have to do that again for a while.   I don’t mind canning and food preserving, but I like gardening and general cooking a whole lot more.          

Create Your Own Alternatives to Convenience Foods                  

I like to take advantage of days where I have a little more time at my disposal to create my own alternative to convenience foods.   If there are some basic pre-prepped items on hand, it is easier to cope when time is more restricted.   For example, yesterday I harvested lettuce.   I harvested far more than we could possible need for one evening’s meal.   In fact, we did not have any salad that night, as dinner was a stir-fry of a lot of other fresh harvested items.   I harvested this lettuce though for the purpose of making life simpler for the next several days.                           

After dinner was done, I washed the lettuce and spun it dry in my salad spinner.                            

The lettuce was then torn into bite size pieces and placed in a very large bowl.                                 

This was then covered with plastic wrap and the whole thing was placed in the fridge.                                

Similarly, I keep a dozen hard boiled eggs on hand in the fridge (also done when I have a moment or two of extra time) and the freezer has bags of frozen sliced celery, sliced peppers, and diced onions which can be scooped out and used in cooking on an as needed basis.     It takes about 20 minutes to boil eggs, cool them down, and put them in the fridge.   These simple steps along with purposefully cooking more than we need when making meals (so that we have leftovers in the fridge on a regular basis) forms the foundation of my alternative convenience meals.                 

The lettuce is used to make lunches or dinner salads.   By adding sliced boiled eggs, or slices of left over grilled meat, or crumbled goat cheese and some nuts, craisins, and/or croutons.   Voila!   You have a very tasty main course salad with less than five minutes of prep.   Another fast meal is to use our fresh hen eggs to make omelet’s, filling them with grated cheese and some diced (frozen) onions and peppers that were quickly sautéed until tender.   The frozen veggies were already prepped so this is a very fast meal to prepare and yet very satisfying.   And of course, the ultimate convenience meal is to just reheat some leftovers from another day’s bigger cooking efforts.                            

Relish Having an Excuse to Slow Down                      

My last observation on this topic is that I personally relish having an excuse to slow my life down from the frantic pace of modern life.   I think many of us that are type A personalities feel vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of just “doing nothing”.   While I value and appreciate rest and relaxation, the truth is I actually “relax” more if I also feel like there is still something “productive” happening.   It’s kind of sad really that I feel that way, but it is the truth.   Gardening and cooking meals using the bounty of the garden results in a valuable contribution to my family’s well being.   The fact that I can provide that value while moving at a much slower pace, enjoying being outdoors, dressed in comfortable clothes, and taking lots of breaks to just admire and wonder at the science and magic that a garden represents – is pretty amazing stuff.                         

What are some of the secrets of your success in making your food production garden a part of your modern life?                

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener