MindSpinner

What I’d really like to do is to build a privacy fence around the back yard. I don’t care for fences, particularly, but then I think my neighbors would prefer to be shielded from my aberrant activities. No, I don’t mean gardening in the nude, per se.

Having built my fence, I’d have my two African Pygmy goats. They’d have a little shed and yard, but I’d also park them in a movable pen (already have this) out in the grass, so that they could “mow” here and there. Pygmy goats don’t produce prolific amounts of milk, but they can be milked, and their milk is supposed to be good, as goat milk goes. We are not big milk drinkers in this house, anyway. Their manure would contribute to enviable compost. I’d also keep two Khaki Campbell ducks. Khaki Campbells are excellent egg layers and garden citizens. They make it their business to eat flies and all manner of garden pests. I’ve heard they even eat Japanese beetles, which would endear them to me forever. I’d just have to grow my lettuce someplace where they are not. They’d have a shed and run, and the run would be roofed in case the bird flu invades.

Even though I can’t manage, financially, half of what I mention here, the back yard will gradually become half vegetable garden anyway, neatly arrayed in raised beds. (Two of these are already in place.) The generic red maple near the house would come out before it makes too much shade and would be replaced by three dwarf, disease resistant apples - likely Williams Pride, Ark Black, and Liberty. At the back of the lot I’d plant two Pawnee pecan trees, forty feet apart. There are already peaches, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries and herbs in the kitchen garden.

Why am I fantasizing about such things? Am I simply romanticizing a rural life? Well, partly maybe. And I do love gardens and animals. But I’ve lived a semi-rural life before, cared for animals and shoveled stalls; I’ve planted and hoed my mother’s long garden rows in the red earth of the Georgia mountains, so this is not naive foolishness. The vision and the wish really come down to this: this half acre, properly managed, could sustain a small family. I’ve lost faith that my profession will provide enough for us in the long run, and more fundamentally that our way of life in this country is secure and sustainable. Something in me says that a fruitful garden may be more pertinent in the second half of my life than a TruGreen ChemLawn.