Why I Grow My Own Food…One Mile Away from the Grocery Store

In late 2016, I decided I needed to do something different. And it needed to be drastic.

My husband and I were suffering the cultural whiplash of relocating from downtown Chicago to the suburbs of Kansas City. The election had ended, but there was no end in sight to the vitriol in the news. And I had no idea where my career was headed.

To top it all off, we’d bought an enormous, ugly house. A house so ugly, it was even featured on an episode of HGTV’s House Hunters. It was the house that the husband and wife—who previously couldn’t seem to agree on anything—both agreed was a definite “no.”

Life was feeling more and more like a merry-go-round — one that someone was pushing faster and faster. And my fingers were beginning to slip.

As the year wound down, I found myself journaling: “I want to live simply. To be closer to the earth.”

Looking back, I don’t think I meant it so literally. But that’s how it happened.

I should say that I don’t do well with uncertainty.

Anxiety is in my genes. My mom and I are on the same medication. My grandpa dealt with his nerves by maintaining a painfully detailed schedule.

I’ve had panic attacks. I’ve developed—and recovered from—an eating disorder. (As much as one can, anyway. I occasionally catch myself looking sideways at the scale in my gym—as though I were sneaking past an ex who could never give me what I needed.)

Up until a few years ago, my way of coping with my anxiety was was to imagine every possible thing that could go wrong as a result of every choice I could make. And then plan what I’d do if it happened. It wasn’t a very productive use of my time. Or emotion. Or energy.

My personal goals were really just ways to fill up blocks of time until the next major life event. I remember sitting in the shower after the 2012 Chicago marathon, wolfing down a sub sandwich from Jimmy John’s. As I poked a piece of shredded lettuce down the shower drain, I thought, “Now what?”

Even my relationship with my husband—once we understood that we were serious—centered around planning for the future. Our wedding. Our move. Our house. Our investments. Our retirement.

I couldn’t stop. There was nothing that forced me to be present enough to slow down. Nothing I could do that didn’t seem binary in its potential outcome—pass or fail.

Until I started to grow my own food.

I didn’t grow up on a farm. We didn’t have a vegetable garden when I was a child. And houseplants seemed to loose the will to live in my presence. But the idea of growing my own food appealed to me nonetheless.

“I just want to grow a few things. Winter squash. Tomatoes. Garlic and basil. Maybe potatoes.”

“Okay,” my husband said. “Where do you want to do all this?

Our yard is big. It takes about an hour to mow with a 24" push-mower. It was part of why we bought the house—part of what we’d moved from Chicago to have. So I paced out my plot. We ripped out rose bushes and pampas grass. Brought in truckloads of compost to condition the clay soil. And I planted my garden.

The squash produced two anemic fruit, pale and small and eventually destroyed by pickleworms. The potato harvest was laughable, but edible. The garlic—planted from bulbs at the grocery store—produced bulbs no larger than an infant’s fist, but they would do in dinners.

On the other hand, I had more cherry tomatoes than I could eat, and so much basil that I was begging people to take gallon-sized bags of it. I included a recipe for pesto to sweeten the deal.

It wasn’t an unmitigated success. But it wasn’t an utter failure, either.

And it felt good. Really good.

Something as simple as garlic sizzling and popping in a drizzle of olive oil took on a new dimension. I was cooking it, yes…but I had grown it, too.

I had controlled something fundamental to my existence—my consumption of food—from beginning to end. I wasn’t just going through the motions, doing the things that make us all feel like adults, like paying bills and doing laundry. It was self-sufficiency on a whole new level.

And I wanted more of it.

I started doing research. Pouring over our grocery receipts to figure out what kinds of produce we bought the most. Arranging and rearranging garden layouts. Working to understand what plants did well next to each other, and when to sow or transplant all of them.

My husband saw how serious I was about all of it. How much joy it gave me. How it kept me focused on the season, the week or even the moment in front of me. He knew when I said, “I’m going to check on the garden real quick,” that I’d be gone for at least an hour, gently turning over leaves, picking off pests, examining swelling fruit. And when he saw me chasing rabbits out of the yard, waving and clapping after them like a madwoman to keep them from munching all my spinach, his heart decided I needed a bigger, better garden.

Eventually, I started writing about everything I was learning. Taking pictures that explained the finer details of growing various things—ones I hadn’t been able to find elsewhere.

Then last summer, as we stood in line at the grocery checkout he said, “It looks like we eat nothing but junk food, because we hardly buy produce anymore. It’s kind of cool.”

“It is,” I agreed with a smile. But slowly, quietly, the wheels in my mind began turning.

How hard would it be to grow all our own produce? Could I go bigger? Could I grow fruit trees? Could I preserve what I grow on a scale larger than some jars of salsa and pickles?

I began to consuming books about growing food. Reading about the benefits of a seasonal diet. Understanding why growing your own food is one of the best things you can do for the environment. Developing recipe lists that would help me make use of everything that grew up out of the ground—even some of the things I would have normally thrown away. Planting trees and fruit bushes.

We haven’t purchased produce at the grocery store—outside of things that won’t grow in our climate or without at least five years of tree growth—for almost half a year. And it’s not just our buying habits that have changed.

I pay a lot less attention to the news and a lot more attention to the weather forecast. I crave the feeling of my hands in the dirt. I notice the tiniest details—not out of obsessive worry, but out of sheer curiosity.

And my mind doesn’t stray far from my most basic needs—food, water, love and sunscreen.