Ruth posted this comment on the post below, and I moved it up here, as I thought she made a good point.

In all of the try and try again, do you think there’s some benefit in narrowing your focus to what works? For instance, over the years, my dad has planted almost everything, but in the later years, he has narrowed his focus to tomatoes and green beans with a few peppers and cucumbers thrown in–not very many. After trying to cultivate a number of different kinds of fruit trees, he has narrowed to simply apple trees. He grows what works best, and what he likes best (for instance, he doesn’t care for zucchini and doesn’t grow it, even though it’s easy).

I think the answer to this is, it depends. I remember the first year we planted a rather ambitious garden. A nice row of carrots were included. The carrots came up as stumps, and I didn’t consider it worthwhile to investigate the problem. Space is an issue here in suburbia, and the low cost of grocery store carrots didn’t make it valuable for me to pursue fixing the issue. If our family were carrot connoisseurs, however, I might see the matter differently. When time and help are more available, I will revisit it.

I also grew rainbow-colored sweet peppers. They turned out well. However, nobody in the house cares for sweet peppers (including me), and it was somewhat dumb to grow them. They were cool, though, and it did make for good neighbor relations as we gave them away.

There are certain things that I will concede aren’t worth the hassle. In my original post, my point wasn’t so much that we should force things that don’t want to be forced. Rather, if there are things that can be fixed, you should fix them instead of giving up. A good local example in my case would be—have plenty of citrus, dabble in the berries and easy vegetables, but forget the cold weather crops, such as broccoli and asparagus.

On another level, I think you are right that we should choose our battles thoughtfully, not resolving ourselves to fight every one that springs up. Conquering for it’s own sake isn’t always wise. I think we should choose our battles carefully, following through with the ones we’ve deemed worth the effort. Sometimes you don’t have the option of giving up, especially if you have two-year-olds or teenagers.

There are a few reasons that we grow some of our own food. The first is, we want our children to equate work with food. The Bible tells us that if a man doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat. At the same time, our culture tells us that if you don’t feel like working, Uncle Sam will feed you. In order to counteract the present entitlement mentality, we purposely choose to do things that might seem odd on the surface. Why toil to raise food when we can afford a few strawberries? But there really is a method to the madness.

Part of that method is learning to provide for some of our own needs. We are hardly close to being self-sufficient, but any small steps in that direction are worth taking. The more that our children learn to “take the bull by the horns,” if you will, the less inclined they will grow up to be cogs in a wheel. I desire to give each of my children a broad set of skills, as specialization only works best in an industrial model, a model we’re trying to jump off of.

Doing things for ourselves is a stepping stone to a more independent lifestyle: when the septic clogs, it is my husband who snakes the line; when the appliances break, it is my husband who repairs them; when the only house we could afford was older and in need of work, my husband remodeled it, learning as he went along. (To what end is it worth pursuing a more independent lifestyle? Because the more free of the rat race you are, the more available you are to do God’s bidding.) There are millions who are better gardeners than me, but the point is not to let the specialists do everything for you. That’s why so many people think they can’t homeschool—our culture has effectively conditioned us to leave everything up to the professionals. From supporting us in our old age to growing a few tomatoes, they do it all. I wonder when they’ll start wiping our noses too.* Chalk it up to our part in the rebellion to “the powers that be.”

I’m not sure where all that came from, but if nothing else, I sure do like how my tomatoes taste better than the commercial ones.

* Ah yes…the new Pre-K programs.