West side farm

Did you know that if you turn a fan onto tomato seedlings to simulate the wind it will strengthen their stems? So I did. "Look, Pops," I said to Steve, "tomato plants doing push-ups!"

I gave away several plants and have started rerouting some others to the back yard. Every morning and every evening I walk around the garden, like the lady of the manor surveying her land, checking out the progress of this newfangled method of gardening in square foot patches. So far, so good.


The radishes are up. So are the beets, the beans, wispy onions are visible, wispier carrots have poked through. One sunflower sits proudly in the center of its square foot, there's lots of corn, some greens, cosmos, nasturtiums and I forget what else.

On the day I planted the first 4x4 I carefully made a diagram of the 16 sections. I was so very careful to do it right. Whether it's short-term memory loss or the dyslexia I live with, something went wrong and the sections are all catywompus. I got a few of them right, but I must have run from the plot to the kitchen table to write down each little bit as I planted it, and it all moved around in my head. The map is useless.

I did better on the second 4x4. Not being as neat and tidy, I had the diagram right there. The writing is all sloppy and crooked because I had no stable place to balance it except in my hand, but so far everything is popping up in the expected site and quantities.