Who...

My great-grandparents were self-sufficient farmers in rural West Virginia in the late 1800s and well into the 20th century. They had 14 children, 12 of whom survived into adulthood. All of the children participated actively in the seemingly endless hours of daily work it required to keep the 60-acre farm going. My grandfather (who is standing barefooted with hat in hand just to the left of my great-grandfather) helped tend the kitchen garden. In addition to a prolific vegetable garden, they had chickens, pigs, and a milk cow. My great-grandmother would sell the eggs in order to buy coffee, sugar, fabric, and other essentials.

None of my great-grandparents' children grew up to become self-sufficient farmers themselves, but most of them tended substantial back-yard gardens that kept their own families well-fed. My grandfather was a mechanic for the Cadillac Company in Washington, D.C. My mother said he would come home from work each evening and work in his garden for at least an hour before dinner. My grandmother would can a good bit of the garden produce so they could enjoy the fruits of his labor throughout the year.

Both my grandfather and mother taught me the basics of backyard gardening, but it wasn't anything they had to force upon me. My desire to grow my own food feels like it's in my blood, like it's genetically programmed into me. When my grandfather was tending our family's garden in the early 1970s, that's where I wanted to be. I loved every step of the process: soil preparation, seed planting, watering, pruning, harvesting, and eating. I still remember the extraordinary taste of the first strawberry I had grown myself at age eight.

For my great-grandparents, growing their own food was a way of life that was somehow encoded in their genetic material and passed on to me, rearranged and reformulated along the way, to help create this strange game called the One-Ton Backyard Garden Food Challenge. They had no way of knowing how their daily labors would mold and shape their descendants' behavior any more than I can know how my meanderings in the garden will affect my own descendants one-hundred years from now.

My daughter and I will be doing the soil preparation, planting, tending, and harvesting of our one-ton garden yield this year, but all of our ancestors, in one way or another, will be there to help us, every step of the way.

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Of course, we'll be receiving help along the way from neighbors, friends, and even the world-renowned Zeke himself. Zeke is a real gem. All I have to do is log on to the Internet, type in any question I have about anything using my favorite search engine, click any link, and there is my good ol' buddy Zeke, tellin' me everything I want to know about what I came to the Internet to ask.

My good friend Bill introduced me to Zeke a couple of years ago when Bill asked me where I had learned about planting fava beans as a form of "green manure". I told him I learned it all on the Internet. Bill snorted out a laugh and replied, "You mean you learned it from Zeke. Last I heard, Zeke was livin' in an old clapboard shack holed up in the hills of Tennessee, sitting under a dimly lit light bulb in front of a computer screen in a smoke-filled room, one of those hand-rolled funny cigarettes hangin' from his mouth, typin' pure nonsense on the Internet just to see how many yuppies would believe his crap."

Misinformation or good information, I like Zeke, and I'm going to seek out his advice from time-to-time. In the meantime, I'm going to do some digging and egg collecting and thinking about what I want to plant this year.