A blog is born

If you find yourself staring at these words, you are probably pondering the normal existential questions: What am I doing here? Why has this blog come to be?

In the interest of enlightenment, I’ll dispense with these questions below.

The Farmitage was born of a fairly simple idea. My roommates and I, who live together in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, have a big, sunny backyard and wanted to start a garden. Meanwhile, some of our other friends were just starting to get really interested in big ideas like sustainability and permaculture.

Conspiratorial discussions ensued, often over red wine, High Life, or rye whiskey. Soon, our plan for a little tomato patch out back had grown into something bigger. What we were proposing, we realized, was an old-fashioned cooperative, something we knew about because one or two of us have hippie parents. The six of us, RIK, the Breach, Koan, Brooke, Half Pint, and myself, would pool our labor, capital and ingenuity to build the best little urban farm we could.

Our main mission is now pretty clear: We want to produce as much good food as we can on a small city lot, while keeping costs low and taking full advantage of free and available resources. Along the way, we also hope to construct something of a philosophy of life. We’ll let you know that goes.

Why the blog, then? We see it as a tool both to share and document what we’re doing and to solicit advice from people who have been there before. Feel free to email us or badger our comments sections when you think we’re doing something crazy or when you just want to say hi. In fact, we’d love it if you would.

Over the next few days, we’ll begin outlining the work we’ve already done, from our first planning and design meetings to the urban foraging we’re up to our necks in now. After that, we’ll try to post whenever we do major work on the garden or learn something that seems worth sharing. We’ll maintain this blog as an up-to-date journal of what we’re doing and what ideas we strike along the way.

Thanks for checking in, and come back soon, if just to will spring into coming a few weeks early. Let's close with a toast: To Farmitage, to springtime, to life!