Spring is here, and so the beautiful struggle that is Front Range vegetable gardening begins again. For me, in a house on a wind-pounded hill east of Boulder, it starts tenderly and optimistically, as it must, with tiny seedlings sprouting under the 6400 Kelvin grow lights in my basement. Then the campaign moves outdoors and progresses, like some sort of Kübler-Ross grief exercise, through the stages of hope, fear, heartbreak, renunciation, and, finally, acceptance, as the proud harvest commences, yielding heirloom tomatoes and weird cucumbers which, factoring everything in, cost me somewhere between 35 and infinity dollars per pound.
When you don’t rely on the food you grow for survival, gardening is a civvy’s way to intimately experience nature’s violence without too much being on the line. There is always…
