Mmmmm. (X1)

While growing up, my family kept a vegetable garden in the corner of our suburban lawn.  The garden was not huge - we've expanded it slightly almost every year to the present, but back back then it was maybe 12 feet on each side.  In typical suburban lawn fashion, the developers had scraped away and sold all but the two inches of topsoil necessary to cover the place in a resource-intensive grass lawn; below that was mostly hard, red clay.  My dad raised the beds with railroad ties, started a compost pile, and began turning the soil religiously.  Within a few years, most of the rocks had been picked out and the clay slowly gave way to richer soil.

We grew the typical garden fare: tomatoes, carrots, onions, bell peppers, broccoli, sweet peas, salad greens, beets, herbs.  Even in this modest plot, the yields could be pretty impressive.  Many years we would return from our state park vacation to find our tomato plants bent to the ground with juicy red fruit.

Too much juicy red fruit.