the very beginning

How do you start a farm?  It's hard to know where to begin.  Our interest in growing our own food began, inconveniently, when we lived in a one-bedroom apartment.  We started seeds on our coffee table that first spring, and moved them out onto our narrow balcony when the weather warmed.

We were ambitious, planting everything from watermelon to cilantro.  But our porch was tiny, so as our plants grew, we gave them to friends who had more space (and possibly more sense).

 The next spring, we tried guerilla gardening.  There was a skinny, soggy piece of wilderness behind our apartment complex, undeveloped because it lay in the city's hundred year flood plain. Our garden was accessibly only by a narrow trail and a trip across a sewage pipe, so the deer visited more frequently than we did.  It was overrun with copperheads, and once my dad fell in the creek trying to get there. For our effort, we didn't harvest much except a few tiny carrots.  It made us want more.

Two years later, we have our very own dirt outside the back door of our very own home.  It's a small 50's ranch on 2/3 of an acre. That's just enough space to raise chickens, rabbits, quail, tomatoes, persimmons, cucumbers, figs, squash, herbs, potatoes, muscadine grapes, and hopes, along with an incorrigible red bone coon hound mutt. Keep reading... we're learning to urban farm the hard way.