Mendolonium

There is a lot more going on at Casa Mendolo than just cooking our food from scratch.

We are growing our food.

Over the past few years I have come to realize not only how unhealthy the typical American diet is, but how unsustainable and environmentally damaging it is. The fundamental solution to these problems is to eat locally (i.e., to eat food that is grown and produced within a short distance of your home) and seasonally. How much more local can you get than your own yard?

Jeff recently took a two month break between graduate school and a postdoc. He spent most of that time working to turn our back yard into a mini-farm. Notice that I use the word farm, rather than garden. To me gardening implies a hobby. This is not a hobby. This is a fundamental lifestyle change on our part. Certainly a great deal of work will be entailed, but we also expect many rewards: fresh, healthy, organic, and inexpensive food for our family (and perhaps others depending on our success) and a significant reduction in our carbon footprint and the amount of environmental degradation that we cause.

I’ll get to all of the details in later posts: what we’re growing and how we’re doing it. My previous gardening endeavors have focused primarily on our roses as well as a successful herb garden and a marginally successful attempt to grow a few tomatoes (2 out 4 plants thrived) and bell peppers (1 out of 2 plants thrived). This will be a great adventure for us and I am sure that we will encounter challenges, failures, and successes along the way.

Feel free to stop by in person anytime. We’ll give you a tour of the farm.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under A Life Sustainable, Around the Farm, The Family Mendolo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.