Naturally challenging

To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity.

- John O'Donohue, Anam Ċara

This is my third year of vegetable gardening. I was so excited to move to a house that had a yard, a space for a garden, a patch of sunlight to support it. I have come to know the joys of knowing that half my dinner will come from my backyard. 

For about three months. 

I am not yet (although I am working on it) the kind of gardener that can maintain a continual harvest. I know there are ways of planting that will do this for you, in my fortunately mild climate, but this will be my first year trying it.

It is for this reason that I am continually in awe of organic gardeners, and of people who lived off the land for all the years that echo back into time before grocery stores and farmer's markets  and the relative abundance of today. 

Making do is what they did, beautifully. Cuisine based on the land and what it would yield. Being a locavore was a given.

Today it is even more natural to not be a locavore. I live in one of the most abundant areas in the west and could not maintain a locavore diet without considerable pain.

What I am saying, in a roundabout, circumambulatory, and run-on sentence-y kind of way, is that my hat goes off to one of my favorite ladies and reads, Life as I know it, and her undertaking the locavore challenge.