I’ve been off eating chicken for many years. That seems like an odd statement, but it’s the initiative for this blog and our push into urban gardening.

I’ve got a farm background. Grwoing up we used to raise our own chickens and beef. I *love* chicken. Fried, shake and bake, roasted, boiled chicken and rice, I’ll eat it. But years ago the grocery store chicken became unpalatable to me. The factory raised and ‘seasoned’ chicken just wasn’t something I could eat. And eventually my spouse felt the same way. The last time we had store bought chicken, it came out of the oven smelling nasty, with the bottom of the pan full of water. Water? From chicken? It went in the garbage.

So we started getting our chicken and our beef from local farmers. For chicken, we get organic free range chicken. It’s not necessarily all ‘certified’ but it’s different in a few respects from chain store chicken. First, it’s not injected with water and saline. Secondly, the chickens are roaming around loose. And finally, the chickens are older. The idea of eating 6 week old chicken, barely more than a chick, is also nasty – and I don’t have a problem eating chicken. In any event, we’re back to being a chicken eating family again, Yum!

The results of the chicken experience was that I did a slight bit of research on the area of local and organic farming. In addition, we’ve had various scares here in the last few years on food that’s processed by others.  Listeria in processed meats killing a few folks, E coli on vegetables all over the place, and so on.  So I am now a proponent (when convenient) of locally grown food. I don’t have any specific objections to factory farming, but everything combined (transportation costs, pesticides, material introduced during handling in unknown facilities in unknown countries, buying local) has shifted my preference to buying food where convenient, from local farmers.  So where possible, without shifting our lifestyle, we try to watch what we eat and where it was raised or grown.  It’s turning out to be relatively easy, less expensive, and better tasting than the alternative.

And that finally takes us to where we are now. Like many kids, my son is fascinated with growing things. So this year I decided to create an urban vegetable garden in our back yard (we live in a standard subdivision in a small town in Ontario). It’s an activity my son and I can do over the course of the summer, it’ll produce vegetables for our table, it’ll be something he can have fun with, and I expect we’ll have enough vegetables that he can proudly carry some vegetables over to the neigbhours.

One of the great things about this type of vegetable gardening is that almost anyone can do it.  It’s small, compact, easy to maintain, and high yield.