uber-locavore

I hear all the time about saintly locavores who manage to mostly eat things grown within 100 miles of their homes.  Of course, it seems like most of these people live in Northern California, Portland, Oregon, or other places where there is actually farmland within 100 miles of their home.  If I were to eat only local foods here in Paris, I would probably end up eating a diet consisting only of wild asparagus and cheese from radioactive, acid-rain drinking goats.  

So I've decided to start a vegetable garden.  June being the perfect time to start a garden (rigorous research has revealed that June is, quite simply, not a planting month for anything),  I decided to plant carrots and winter lettuce.  The directions on the seed packages made them both look difficult to screw up.  Benoît chose, perhaps more wisely, to plant chervil, chives, tarragon and parsley.  Chives, as Benoît pointed out, you can practically plant on linoleum.   (Luckily we don't have linoleum.)  I should point out that Benoit had his heart set on a lime bush, and rightly so because all of our limes come from South America.  Nonetheless there weren't any at the garden store, probably because it would be a feat defying nature to make a citrus plant grow anywhere north of Lyon. 

As an apartment dweller, I'm limited to plants that grow well in containers.   (But I do have a terrace so the plants can get some daytime sunlight.)  On my list of possibles are tomatoes, black-eyed peas, eggplants, cucumbers, fennel, broccoli, shallots, and potatoes, but what I really want to do is grow a pumpkin.  I've read up, and apparently you can train them to grow up trellises. Amazing! If only I could train my cat not to pee on the pumpkins.  I suspect that my cat is dumber than a pumpkin.  However I've missed the pumpkin planting window entirely for this year, so the pumpkin-cat comparisons will have to wait.

If you have any suggestions about great container vegetables I'd love to hear them!  I seem to have misplaced my camera (surprise!) but if I ever find it, I will take pictures of my burgeoning farm for all to see.