Why Fake and Bake When You can Snow and Grow?
Living in Southern California I thought I'd seen everything. The plastic boobs. The nearly synthetic hair. The folks in their blinged out Hummers showing up at the food bank. The moms passing off organic bakery treats as their own home cooked fare.
But wait for it... there's more.
Last summer my uber planned community started a bit of a social experiment. They launched a "neighborhood garden". A little park that is divided into small plots upon which we may grow our own veggies and flowers. Rent is cheap - about fifty to a hundred bucks for a year. If you are not from So Cal, you are probably wondering why the heck we suburbanites need to plant our gardens in a park, but if you are from here you know that for the most part, our McMansions barely fit on our postage stamp's worth of property. There's no room left for corn.
I'm not sure how this little slice of hippie fun slipped by the HOA. Gardening is a messy and motley business and some people have rusty, quirky, "arty" sculptures that they've smuggled onto their farm plot. These would never be allowed on a front lawn. But frankly I think the HOA saw it as an easy way to make a buck off that useless land under the powerlines. (It was originally slated to be a dog park until someone complained the dogs would get too much radiation.)
My nature loving family was one of the first to sign up for the neighborhood kibbutz. We promptly planted and killed our crops last summer. But since we are gluttons for punishment, we're coming back for more this year. Lessons learned. We showed up earlier to plant this time around. Apparently that's what it takes to grow a bumper crop. This year is going to be different. That much is evident already, as several of the plots have been vacated by the original farmers.
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