“Everybody knows that drought is bad for growing things, but it wasn’t until last year that I learned heavy rain following drought is also bad, at least for tomatoes. The dry weather causes their skin to lose elasticity, and the sudden increase in moisture causes them to swell and burst. The fruit is still edible if you pick it fast enough, but a tomato becomes bug bait as soon as its insides are exposed. Crops don’t wait, and they often don’t keep.

This is one of the many lessons we’ve learned since leaving our concrete stamp in Philadelphia for three green acres in North Carolina in 2022. My wife and I initially relocated to be closer to family and because we wanted a yard where our kids could play. But as we acclimated to the greenery of the Piedmont, our appetites grew. We wanted more than a yard; we craved the full pastoral.

And so we bought a property with a large perennial pollinator garden, fruit trees, numerous trellises, a lengthy blueberry hedge, nine large raised beds and the pièce de résistance: a Lord & Burnham greenhouse built over the top of the walkout basement. We saw the house for the first time on a Wednesday. By Sunday, we were under contract and fantasizing about a homestead, where we would strive for self-sufficiency: growing and raising most of what we eat.

But three years later, most of the produce and all of the animal protein our family of five eats comes from Costco, Walmart or our local farmers market. Homesteading was simply not for us — though it did reinforce for me the miracle of modern agriculture.”

From Washington Post.