today I started to plan the layouts of the garden. For some reason that seems impossible now, I thought the only consideration would be the layout.
The method of farming I'm using is called squarefoot gardening. Basically just farming in small, planned out grid instead of the rows that big farms use.
There's an app (pictured above) that tells you how many of each plant you can plant in a single square foot. The moment I saw those numbers was the moment I realized just how hasty I was in jumping into this project. Which is to say that I hadn't given any thought to the amount of food that I actually wanted to get out of my crops - I just wanted to farm.
Here's the 100% true story. I was eating a caprese sandwich and I had this thought: everyone we know is making their own bread. If we could make our own cucumbers and tomatoes then we'd be able to make our own caprese sandwhiches. I honestly a caprese sand which once every three years at most. But the idea stuck.
It's an oversimplification to say that I started farming because I wanted a caprese sandwich in the same way to say that WWI was started by an assassination. 2020, even before it got weird, had been filled with thoughts about our collective relationship with nature as well as my own personal one.
Which is all to say that farming, like everything else in life, has been imbued with so much meaning that it didn't start with or ask for that it's more a symbol than anything else. It's been almost exclusively an emotional, physical, poetic pursuit. And it feels like pendulum is starting to swing.
Planting cucumbers and tomatoes, as was the initial plan, doesn't make much sense when you consider the opportunity cost. If meaningfully providing food for our household was the starting objective then I'd have a 4' monoculture of onions and garlic - our two most frequently used ingredients. My intuition says that yields for the sake of sustenance shouldn't be an objective for the first year of this journey.
Now I understand how menacing and foreboding the saying "you reap what you sow" really is. I'm running out of time to find and plant seeds so I need to come up with a plan over the next couple of days.