Going off the grid

Two weekends ago, Chris was browsing through the Saturday paper when an ad for the Asheville Herb Festival caught his eye and he announced that we should put in an herb garden this season. Never one to disagree with fresh basil, we scoped out our yard and designated a small, rectangular patch to where we would put in an herb box and plant some spices.

I had tried to grow a few basil plants last summer in the corner of a flower bed, but between the bugs and poor maintenance, I only got enough leaves to make one or two pots of tomato-basil soup. Nothing spectacular, but after watching countless hours of cooking shows on Food Network, I do prefer to use fresh herbs and spices in our meals, and if we could somehow grow them ourselves and stop paying for them at the store that would be ideal. Enter my husband, his strong back, his barely used power tools, and the fact that this is the first summer I have him at home on the weekends with two fully-working knees, and, By God, we are going to have the finest herb box our cul-de-sac has ever seen.

The first step was weaving through the masses at the Herb Festival. I hadn’t been to the Farmer’s Market for some time, and forgot the interesting mix of mountain-folk, dread-heads, yuppies and normal people, like us, that filter into the market to pick up their weekly produce and plants. And let’s just say that if there’s a sale on medicinal herbs in the Asheville-area, you can bet on a pretty good visual arcade of personalities. It’s better than the food court at the mall.

So we get in and get out with our herbs, and on the way back to our car notice an old, crusty farmer selling vegetable seedlings and Chris stops and says, Hey, I bet we could fit a few veggies in our new herb box if you want. And, of course, I say, Sure. Why not? And we proceed to buy an assortment of peppers and squash transplants from a man with four teeth and the oldest pair of denim overalls ever made. And as we drove home, I weaved stories of how, this summer, I won’t have to go to the store hardly at all, and how we’ll just be able to eat everything out of the garden. Because a diet a yellow squash, bell peppers and cilantro will be all we need to survive. And, Don’t Worry!, because I’ll make it delicious. I’m pretty sure I watched Giada make a fabulous dish out of just those ingredients on her show last week.

And after unloading our new plants out of the car, and then unloading our little peanut into her crib for a nap, we started digging, tilling and hammering away at our new project outside. And I can’t remember if it was before or after the final beams were nailed in, but we took a step back and realized how small our little garden-box seemed next to all of the herbs and veggies we bought. And then I read on the plants that they needed to be spaced at least 24-inches apart, to which I said, I don’t think that’s a big deal. We could probably half that, right? To which Chris replied, Last year’s basil, honey. This year, we’re doing it right.

And to DO IT RIGHT, we realized that our new little box would house just our herbs and spices, and that we would have to take a 25-foot strip of grass out of our side yard, cut down a fully-grown pine tree and re-sod where that tree was. All by ourselves. All with the shovels and tools we already had in our garage. Which was a pretty sizeable, exhausting project to accommodate the fifteen-dollars worth of vegetable seedlings we bought from a man with four teeth. But we did it. And so far everything’s still alive.

And to keep the ball rolling, last weekend we decided to dig out a few bushes and completely makeover our flower garden as well.

So, as you can see, if I have been for lack of blogging the past few weeks, it’s because our household has been a flurry of digging, planting, watering and nursing our sore backs. Luckily we have a little girl that likes to be outside so much, and allows us to use her ladybug sprinkler to help with the watering.

Now if only there was a way to get her to eat all the vegetables that we’re gonna survive on this summer. Too bad Mr. Hillbilly Farmer didn’t have any animal cracker plants... THEN we’d be set.