FRED OWENS writes:

I saw this story in the Los Angeles Times that bodes well for the future of farming. I have also spent the weekend in Los Angeles, where new companies have sprung up — they will plant a vegetable garden in your yard, if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, and — going further, because this is Los Angeles — they will plant and cultivate the vegetables for you.

Then all you have to do is go into the back yard before dinner and harvest some arugula for your salad.

This service is for persons of affluence, and it’s a good thing — they’re taking the money they would have spent on golf and yachts and put that money into a more wholesome activity — their own back yard for growing food.

Fred adds:

It may seem kind of fancy-pancy to hire someone to grow your own vegetables, but these people already have money. They are already spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for meticulous lawn care and landscaping — so it’s really only a shift of emphasis — in a good direction, I must add.

As a landscaper, I have often worked for people far wealthier than I am. I avoid the kind of customers who look down on the hired help. Most of the people I know with money are just folks, and I am willing to compete for their business.

It can happen that they were thinking of putting in a nice patio with raised beds and roses — this is good money for me — but they decide to buy a sailboat or remodel the kitchen instead — arggh!

Anyway, back to California trends. They have decided — whoever decides these things, that agriculture is cool. This could be disturbing to conservatives, but conservatives might also be comfortable in their own skins and say “we always knew that farming was cool.”

Laura writes:

I don’t find anything disturbing about hiring people to grow your own vegetables. Unless you worship vegetables. Or make them the object of inordinate love.

One problem with hiring people to grow a vegetable garden, however, is that much of the work is just daily maintenance that doesn’t take very long. If you contract it out, you’re going to end up spending an awful lot for someone to do very simple things. The other problem with hiring it out is that you never learn anything. But there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s just not necessarily a wise use of money as compared to buying from a farmer. The large expense involved raises the question as to whether the vegetable garden in such a case is more a status symbol than a form of pleasure.

Agriculture is cool. That’s a good thing. And fortunately, one doesn’t need a whole lot of money to try it.

                                                       — Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Most people who hire others to grow food gardens could do it themselves. Their motivation in hiring vegetable gardeners is a desire for organically grown, fresh, tasty food, especially heirloom tomatoes and other old-style vegetables. However, from my observations – this practice is taking place near to me – it’s not just a desire for good health; these people are upper middle class foodies, professional people, and they want the best of everything.

But, Heaven forfend, that they might be seen to be in the same class as farmers, peasants or rural people in general, which is how serious vegetable gardeners, even those who’ve never been to a farm in their lives, are viewed. Take my word for it, it’s just another fad, till something that’ll give them even more of a cachet comes down the pike.

Jane R. writes:

The timing of this post is very apropos. Today the Senate passed S510 The Food Safety and Modernization Act. This is not a good thing. With all its damning potential, it’s the controlling of seeds that bothers me the most.

Fred writes:

The foodies and trend-driven people are inching ever closer to the world of farming. And they will discover that the farm is the last bastion of patriarchy in America — the independent lands managed and worked by older white men and their wives, lands that have been feeding the multitudes for generations, across the country and over the world, farmers feeding everyone.

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