farming in the front yard

My daddy was a farmer, grew up on the farm atleast, and always felt a pull to go farm the land. He rented out 40 acres of farmland outside of town and a tractor and planted corn and soybeans when I was a kid. We were living in town then, but he wanted to farm. I don’t remember how the crop turned out. Not well, I guess, because I don’t recall him repeating the experiment. I do recall riding around the field on a sled pulled by the tractor and picking up stones to clear the field for cultivation.

My mother grew up on the family farm in Hillsdale Township, Michigan. I always picture her farm as being on top of a hill for some reason, with Nettie the mom, 10 or 11 siblings, Toby the dog - all together doing their chores. Nettie was a hard worker and so was my mom. She made clothes on the sewing machine with patterns from Penny’s just like her mom. She canned fruits and vegetables that she made us kids go pick on someone else’s farm so we could store them for the winter, just like her mom. We lived in town with grocery stores, but I guess that was the family tradition.

Lately I’ve been feeling my farming roots and have begun farming in the front yard. This transformation was largely facilitated by the arrival of Clayton, my housemate and an avid student of farming. With his enthusiasm for learning how to grow food and my latent (underground?) desire to farm, we started planning projects for the available sunny areas of my lot.

We planned out some raised beds and started making dirt from all the compost heaps around my property. There is compost (decomposed leaf litter) under the leaves in the hedge by the fence, there is compost under the leaves under the eaves of the house; there is compost in the backyard at the bottom of the compost maker bin from all the kitchen scraps I feed in there, there is compost in the old beds where I unsuccessfully tried to grow vegetables a few years ago. There is compost all over the place. We mixed that with the clay dirt from the front yard that we dug out for the walkway and made compost/dirt. It was our own invention.

Then we used the compost/dirt to build the raised beds. They look like smiles because they’re designed to catch the rain. Another patch of raised bed is nearby for the corn. The homies gave us a wooden box which is now growing squash from seeds that were already in the compost/dirt that we filled it with.

Oh, let me mention the walkway. It starts at the street and winds thru the yard to the upper driveway and the front porch. It’s made by laying bricks on the ground and arranging them in a particular way.

The street is held at bay by a restraining wall (newly built) or is it the yard we’re trying to restrain from the street? There is some slope as it runs from north to south. It also opens into full sunlight exposure which fries anything that tries to grow there in the hot summer months (if you don’t water it). I don’t and it turns into a desert. Which is not unreasonable, we live on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert that stretches all the way from Texas to Arizona. It’s not merry old England around here anymore, although you might think so with street names like Greenwich, Robinhood, Devonshire, Bryn Mawr.

I’ll have to water it. We are building cisterns that are attached to the house and will collect rain water from the roof. We have a lawn sprinkler and a hand hose. Water the garden, Rohn. I think we can do this.

It’s the beginning of the winter, not necessarily the best time to plant a garden but we couldn’t wait so we’re turning the sun room into a greenhouse.

We’ve got wildflowers, corn and tomatoes started. Outside, wildflower pollinator seeds and native grass seeds have been sprinkled liberally everywhere, except the raised beds. May the best plant win or each in their own time.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the spring when the warm air brings rain showers and thunderstorms. Everything in the soil will come alive and start to grow: the ground covers like clover and vetch, the wildflowers like indian blanket and bluebonnet, and grasses like side oats grama and buffalo grass. They will be growing up around the islands of food - swiss chard, kale, spinach, sweet corn, carrots, tomatoes.

It’s so much fun. I’m addicted to dirt. I love working in it. Farming! That’s what I’m doing. The other day I was adding compost/dirt to the beds and noticed a stone. I picked it up and then noticed another. After picking up three or four and removing them to the stone pile, the memory came back to me of picking up stones with my dad on the back forty out in the country, riding around behind the tractor on the rock sled. We found those rocks and pulled them out of the field, dragged them over to the rock pile and piled them up. We were farming.