by Pamela White/Editor, Boulder Weekly

My grandparents were urban farmers before the term existed. My mother’s father, inclined to garden perhaps because of his Cherokee heritage, managed to feed his wife and six kids off the vegetables and fruit he cultivated in their large backyard. He collected water in a rain barrel and used it to water the garden, something I found fascinating as a little girl. Even after he lost his teeth, he still ate raw carrots and radishes from his garden. He grew food until after my grandmother’s death, when age and infirmity forced him into a retirement home.

My grandmother knew how to can and make jams and jellies, crucial for preserving the bounty of summer and feeding six hungry kids. My mother recalls her canning “all the time,” putting up apricots, raspberries, tomatoes and as many as 140 quarts of green beans. She came from a farming family that grew food crops — and raised chickens to boot.

My father’s parents also gardened, growing green beans, beets, greens, onions, and preserving cans of green beans and tomatoes in the cellar. I’ve often said that my grandmother was capable of making a feast out of bacon grease and lint. The former she preserved in a little can; the latter is, of course, a joke. She had some wacky ideas about pest control, leaving little tin lids of apple butter out for the ants on the mistaken assumption that the apple butter would attract them and keep them out of the house. I assure you, this did not work.

Ants and apple butter aside, my grandparents had a set life-enhancing skills, from cultivating and preserving food to making their own clothing. (Did I mention my mother’s father built their house himself? What a stud!) But these skills were largely lost in the span of a single generation.

My grandparents tried initiating me into the ancient human ritual of growing food when I was 2. My grandad took me out to the garden, sat me down with some onion sets and showed me how to plant them. As the story is told, I planted one set, then brushed the black Illinois soil off my little fingers and said, “This is hard work.” Then I turned on my chubby legs and toddled back into the house.

That was foreshadowing, it seems.

My parents had a vegetable garden, too, growing summer squash, zucchini, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, swiss chard and other basic veggies. My mother, who’d grown up eating fruit fresh from the tree, added an orchard to their backyard about the time I left home. Although I was called upon — i.e., forced against my will — to work in the garden, I grew up eating a lot of store-bought food like canned green beans, canned tuna, boxed noodle mixes and such. Both of my parents worked, and my mother didn’t have time to come home from the hospital, where she ran an intensive care unit, to tend a garden and feed four kids.

I felt called to start a garden when I had children myself, but as a single mom, I couldn’t quite manage it. It was hard work, and I had so little time.

But now that has changed. Whether it’s genetics or zeitgeist, I felt compelled last year to start a vegetable garden. My younger son, now grown, helped me plant a test garden of sorts, haphazardly sowing veggies amid our flowers and opening up one vegetable bed, in which we planted green beans, broccoli, peppers, cucumbers and squash. It was an exciting time, as we both crept out to the garden each morning to see what had sprouted. Though we didn’t plant that much, we got so much food out of that last-minute agricultural experiment that we decided it was time to become full-blown urban farmers.

So this year, we’ve opened three vegetable beds. Each was enriched with organic mulch, including compost from our own little vermiculture bed. This year we planted the following: arugula, spinach, mixed greens, romaine, swiss chard, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, hot peppers, radishes, corn, cantaloupe, summer squash, zucchini, and acorn squash. We’ve already enjoyed a plentiful harvest of greens and broccoli and will soon be eating green beans every night.

Though I would have told you I know very little about growing vegetables, I find myself telling my son how to do and not to do certain things. “Don’t disturb the green beans while they’re wet. They’ll get gross.” And, “Make sure to water the radishes and tomatoes regularly or they’ll get weird and crack.” I have no idea where this knowledge comes from. But I like to think that something of summers spent visiting my grandparents in Illinois and standing with my mother’s father in his garden rubbed off on me.

One of my most vivid memories from my grandfather’s garden is eating fresh, sun-warmed tomatoes. He grew so many that we often drove back from Illinois to Colorado with a paper bag full of cherry tomatoes and a salt shaker, eating tomatoes the entire way. Last night, my son and I picked our first ripe tomato of the season — an event that ought to come with its own celebration. For me, part of the unspoken joy of picking that single tomato is the kinship I feel with my grandparents. But part of it is the victory of reclaiming my own human heritage and connecting with the earth to grow my own food.

We have grand plans for this urban farm of ours — an orchard, enough food to get us through the winter, hens and a hive of bees. How quickly we accomplish this remains to be seen, but it’s clear to us that there’s no turning back. We’re urban farmers for good.

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