Thanks to David Elcott for this guest post, in conjunction with COEJL’s blog, To Till & To Tend.  David boldly ripped up his lawn last spring to make room for a small farm in his suburban front yard.  This is his third and final post of the season, where he takes stock in the experience.  For the back story, check out his first and second post.

Who would have imagined that from June until the middle of October, we would only be eating vegetables from our own garden: multi-colored summer squash souflee and barbecued okra, leeks and parsnips and carrots in a cabbage soup, eggplants in abundance, stuffed Napa cabbage, baby spinach and enough spicy greens and snap peas to feed an army, a cherry tomato tartine in gold, red, yellow and orange, a banquet of roasted fingerling potatoes, beans that never stopped giving, all flavored with garden herbs.

I prepared cold sweet cucumber soups with the added tartness of rhubarb and ate beets for the first time as part of a root vegetable medley. We decorated our salads with nasturtium and zucchini flowers. And corn, corn, corn – much of which never made it to the kitchen but eaten fresh off the stalk. A time for rejoicing indeed!

The pleasure was not just for the eleven of us in our family. I would look out my window to see neighbors and friends stooped over, harvesting from our farm. Olivia next door and the two sets of twins behind us, none over six years old, lugging a finally discovered zucchini almost as big as they are. The repeated line of “is this all from your garden?” brings such enormous pleasure.

And here is an additional reality of creating a mini-family farm: Once the clearing and tilling and initial labor of planting are over, with good mulching and a bit of hoeing and weeding, maintaining the garden throughout the season is not so much work. These are plants that have developed over millions of years to want to grow, to soak in the sun and water, to resist disease and insects, to produce – just for our family. So I sprayed the aphids with a soap solution and handpicked the beetles that wanted to eat the leaves of my eggplant, but really did not fight too much. The garden seemed in balance and I shared with the rabbits and squirrels and birds. None of us went hungry.

It is Sukkot now, the holiday of the harvest, the one holiday that is called “the time of our rejoicing.” The crops are in, we will not starve, the world works, and all my hard work paid off. The Rashbam, a Medieval Jewish commentator on the Bible, warns us to avoid the hubris of saying , “My power and the might of my right hand has gotten me this wealth (Deuteronomy 8:17).” He is so right. I had to control the ego that swelled when I walked by my little farm. Who am I kidding? I am so dependent on the farmers that provided me with organic seeds and soil, the workers who mixed the organic fertilizer for me, the sun that warmed my plants and the plentiful rain that kept my crops watered, the bees and birds pollinated the flowers, even the wind which is necessary for corn to produce. Sustainable agriculture for me means that I remain acutely aware of this balance, that I am a part of the process and not its master.

We sat in our sukkah, that fragile booth open to the elements, decorated with corn stalks from our field, eating from the cornucopia of our little farm, and recited with great fervor: Blessed is the Eternal who has nurtured us with life that sustains us and allows us to celebrate this moment. This certainly has been a growing season of great rejoicing.

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Photo credit: Sweet Fine Day