What was once words and plans is now a garden. With weeds.
Garden:
Snowpeas:
Tomatoes:
Broccoli:
Sweet Corn:
Carrots:
Swiss Chard: (no picture. they're struggling)
Lettuce: (no picture. too young; it's indecent)
Bell Peppers:
Potatoes: (no picture. no reason)
Fig Tree:
Knockout Rose:
Rio Samba Rose:
The Guitar Garden:
I also have a young bottle tree that has sprouted up right next to my fig tree. I'll have to transplant him when he gets bigger, but for now I'm letting him be:
Above is a map that indicates county-by-county the average size of a Mississippi farm. Not surprisingly, the largest farms are found in the Delta; the Delta counties have always been sparsely populated and agriculturally grounded. Still, Mississippi as a whole is an agricultural state. For counties in the state's center to build their industry around 50-100 acre farms while those in the Delta rely on farms in the thousands of acres is a substantial discrepancy. More on this later.
It is also disappointing (though unsurprising) to find poverty rates the highest in these same places where much land is owned by a select few. While a debate can rage endlessly about the degree of "equality of opportunity" in America, it is nevertheless true that all men stand to the same height as husbandmen. In an age where nepotism and degree requirements can broadside an unwary and uneducated worker, husbandry reduces (or promotes) all men to the same stature. In the tillage of land can a man carve opportunity for himself. Certainly husbandry requires hard work, but barriers of neither education nor race will desiccate a germinating seed or turn aside a rainstorm. In the land (once procured) is found freedom. Many things the land can't provide, but it can delineate a path away from dependency, and it can honestly reward honest labor.
Large-scale industrial farming and medium-scale farming I am told are both prohibitively expensive and prone to crippling bouts of debt. I cannot believe, however, that ultra small scale farming--the type that begins to breed a limited self-sufficiency--is beyond the grasp of all but a few citizens.
Am I making policy prescriptions? No. Am I assigning fault or blame? No. Am I lamenting that--in an area that has both high concentrations of land in few hands and an overcrowding of single-family residences (as the map below indicates)--there is not a more robust realization of Jefferson's yeoman farmer ideal?
Yes.
