How Get Out of Our Yard Became Come Buy Our Herbs

Reader Contribution by Mark Mcgee
Published on August 27, 2010
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Around our house, it is considered a well established fact that the best ideas are all implemented with little forthought during the cognitive stage best known as “half-baked” or “cockamamie”. Just a few short years ago, we were living the quiet lives of apartment-dwelling, opinionated liberal arts baccaulareates, with no dirt under our fingernails, and no real prospect of ever having any. We were hard working slackers, if you can juxtapose those identities; we certainly mastered that art – overworked at our day jobs, underemployed at the home vocation of personal environment building.

However, we have discovered an all important truth since that time, and it is this: one thing tends to lead to another. Which is how we ended up metamorphising from couch potatoes to chicken-raising, herbalist, fruit-growing, future tilapia farmers.

When we finally purchased a house, it was everything we thought we wanted. Only 900 square feet, it sits on a half-acre lot. There are much bigger houses, and there are much bigger lots, but in our price range, there were not many houses or lots which even came close. At the time we moved in, you could barely tell there was a building on the lot, as it was entirely surrounded by thickly overgrown yaupon holly scrub, matted heavily with thorny vines and poison ivy.

We loved the privacy.

At least, we loved it until we realized that people were traipsing through our backyard like it was the Road to Perdition. We could not see the clusters of total strangers standing not more than thirty feet from our back door, and since our little patch of heaven had a long history as a “party hangout” for the row of fraternity and sorrority houses a block away, there was plenty of cultural memory in the community of our back yard being a public stomping ground.

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