This is my dad's garden.
Each year, for the past couple of years, we've planted vegetables and fruits, a few flowers, and used our chickens' "manure" for the fertilizer. And each year, the crop yields a few months of delicious, flavor-packed, fresh organic tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, arugula, mizuna, and/or mustard greens. Not to mention fresh eggs. All to add to my mom's delicious diverse cooking and my dad's killer smoked, grilled, or otherwise steak and BBQ.

I get a lot of amazed reactions from friends at school when I tell them we have chickens in our backyard and a mini-farm like this. It IS a highly urbanized area, in the middle of San Jose, CA. Around here it's pretty unusual to have a garden like we do, but at least we get to have a taste (pun intended) of what it's like to grow your own food in the countryside. And let me tell you, it's awesome, and everyone else is missing out.

Hopefully these photos will inspire someone else in the city to start growing their own food as well. It's fun, and it's a great family thing to look forward to planting new stuff every year around summertime. Go and use every bit of that backyard!

Here are a few pics of old and new things we have going this year.

EDIT: oops, I almost forgot... if you like my garden, pretty please cast a vote my way in the contest! Good luck to all entries out there!