Toward the end of last summer I started noticing that there is a big of a home garden movement going on in Little Rock. I have seen friends talk about putting in their own gardens, and Home Depot is so packed on the weekends you would think they are giving away free iPads.
We are not exempt from the garden craze of course. When we bought this house one of the things we liked was the fact that it had a separate fenced garden area in the back yard. Last year we decided to till the entire area and plant a large garden. We had a row of tomatoes (around 8-10 plants), a row of peppers (banana and bell), a row of cucumbers, and a row that was half watermelon and half herbs (mint, basil, oregano). In addition we also had a blackberry bush, a lemon bush, an orange tree, a large fig tree, and a big rosemary bush.
Needless to say that was a little too much to keep up with. At first things came in slow, a grape tomato here, a pepper there. Towards the end of the summer though we had 5 watermelons growing at one point, probably 10 cucumbers in the fridge, and more tomatoes than we had room for. In fact the tomatoes got so overwhelming we had to just let some die on the vine.
This year we decided to scale back a little a lot. The orange and lemon trees, while cold weather tolerant, did not survive our unusually harsh winter. We decided to not till up the garden this time and just do a few large containers. This year we have 4 grape tomato and one large tomato plants in a container, herbs (basil, oregano, mint and chives) in another, and peppers (6 banana and one bell) in the last. The blackberry bush is still growing strong, and our figs always produce more than we can eat (feel free to come get some in the fall).
So what is it about this home garden craze that has Little Rock going? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that most of us remember eating (or even growing) fresh garden vegetables growing up. Arkansas has a rich farm heritage and it is impossible not to have some level of impact from that. There is also a huge push to eat local foods. We experienced a huge influx of mass-produced food and now finally we are waking up a bit and starting to question where and how our food is grown. Farmers markets have boomed in the area over the past few years. We started with the Little Rock Farmers market, now Argenta is getting in the game. By growing some of our own food it puts us as close as possible to our food. For example when I went out and picked basil and oregano to season dinner last night, I knew the exact journey of that plant.
I know several of friends who read this blog garden. Kerri Case has talked about her gardening experience this year, several of you have talked about it on Twitter, and Jessica Dean has been pushing home gardens for the past year on her Choose Your News KATV segment. If you have home garden story though drop it in the comments. I might try to do a follow-up post later in the summer once some crops start coming in, and I’d like to share some stories.
