A Bit of Perspective

"The one thing people cannot afford to have," wrote Douglas Adams, "is a sense of perspective."  Given that we are all microscopic dots on a microscopic dot in the vastness of space and time, if we ever truly had a sense of our own insignificance, we would go mad.

There are those who would argue, of course, that we are already mad, and they may have a point.

Either way, we couldn't help but be struck by a strange sensation this past weekend when we were up on the roof blowing new insulation into our attic.  Myrtle's place looks a lot different from a bird's-eye point of view, and it got us thinking about our use of space in slightly different ways, which will hopefully bear fruit this fall when we begin reorganization of the garden along more ambitious lines of production.

One of these years, we may invest in a panoramic camera so we can give you a proper grasp of the wideness of our project; these broken glimpses don't do proper justice to what exactly is meant by 1/2 acre.  It's not as vast a space as a sprawling ranch, and yet... by comparison to the miniature strips of dirt and turf attached to most modern homes, it is a sprawling wilderness.

We've noticed, however, that by sticking with any kind of recognizable geometry, we have severely limited the practical growing spaces for our consumable crops.  We will get a full year's worth of salsa and pasta sauces from the tomatoes and peppers in the planters pictured here, and we will get a sizable quantity of corn, as well, but there is room to produce so much more.  We are therefore going to break up these spaces with fenced in areas and build micro- versions of the macro- schema.  The whole thing will take on some qualities of an agricultural equivalent of a fractal drawing.  The smaller pieces should reflect qualities of the whole project.

We have written many times about having to rely on personal experience, given the lack of specific science in the area of microfarming and this, we believe, is part and parcel of that paradigm.  There are, however, some pioneers who have gone before us in the realm of space optimization on smaller plots for the purposes of sustainable food production.

Surely if small-scale farmers can make a go of it on an acre of degraded land in Tibet or Uruguay, we can make it work on a half-acre in the middle of a town whose entire purpose is to support the largest agricultural university in the world.

Of course, the town whose entire purpose is to support the largest agricultural university in the world is, itself, deficient in many of the qualities of progressive thinking necessary to support ventures such as Myrtle's, but that is a whole other topic of conversation.  We will undoubtedly expound upon it when it comes time to start putting in facilities for a goat; we certainly discovered the limitations of the City of College Station when our friends Hugh and Linda first got their chickens.  One thing at a time, though.  Next project:  maximum veggie space.  Then dredging the pond.  Then goats?

Happy farming!