Sunday ROFLMAO blogging

The garden gnome at Eating Liberally. Just go and check out his name.

But on a more serious note, there are clearly starting to be some benefits to growing some of your own food these days, as I realized yesterday while making a lovely Greek village salad and wondering where the cucumbers had originated. The problem is that when you live in a neighborhood dominated by oak trees that are over 100 years old and over 40 feet tall, it's hard to find a place that gets enough sunshine to actually grow anything. My backyard gets ample sun in the morning, largely thanks to the removal three years ago of a hazardous split oak that was rotting inside, but by noon the sun is over the roofline and gone. My front yard gets sunshine in high summer, but I have a gorgeous, huge blue spruce in my yard that I'm spending a fortune paying an arborist to try to save from the fungal infection that is probably going to kill it anyway. It'll kill me when I have to cut it down, I don't want to speed that up.

Then of course there are the bunnies, the squirrels, and other fauna that already feast on my tulips, there have been deer sightings two blocks away, and recently, not three miles from my neighborhood of 75 x 100 lots, a bear was found in a schoolyard. My supervisor at work is an avid gardener, with huge property that gets hours of glorious afternoon sun. But having heard his tales of vegetative woe and his ongoing war against deer, woodchucks, and other beasts determined to ruin his Jeffersonian splendor over the last seven years, it strikes me that trying to grow food and having to be someplace other than your garden for eight hours or more every day seems somewhat incompatible.

That leaves farmer's markets, of which there are precious few in Bergen County during times when working people can go -- and half the stuff available there is trucked in from Pennsylvania anyway. There are a few farm stands left, but most of those truck in a good amount of their produce as well.

Still....every time I see one of those blogs where someone is holding up a lovely bunch of home-grown Swiss Chard, I wonder if there's any possibility of even managing a couple of porch tomatoes...