The beginning: why beets?

I bet this looks like sort of a hipster blog, with a name like Drop beets, not bombs.  So what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure I'm not a hipster.  One of my roommates said last night that I'm not a hipster, as we were coming back from seeing a band you've probably never heard of, man.  But I digress.  My intent is not to create another blog that critiques pop culture, since I don't really think I can add anything useful to that narrative.  I'm not a culture critic, I'm a musician--a classical singer, actually.  I'm currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music at a California liberal arts university.  So what am I doing writing a vegetable gardening blog?

I'm an accidental gardener.  I began composting in high school, to put my family's food waste to good use.  I didn't have any use for the finished compost at the time, so I helped my mom spread it on her flowerbeds.  I guess the compost wasn't as finished as I thought, because a few weeks later, my mom found two errant tomato plants mixed in with her bachelor's buttons.  Since they'd already gotten going, we figured we'd keep them and move them to a bed of their own.  I knew next to nothing about plants in general, much less the care and feeding of tomatoes.  I dug a hole in a sunny spot, threw them in, and hoped for the best.  I didn't water them enough, staked them too late, and did just about everything wrong.  They still set fruit anyway, and then some furry critters chewed holes in all the green tomatoes before they had a chance to ripen.  I got one tomato the size of a golf ball that year, and came away frustrated and wondering why anyone would ever try to grow food.

I remained more or less in that frame of mind until, on a flight back to school after break, I saw an excerpt in my in-flight magazine from Kristin Kimball's memoir on food and farming, The Dirty Life.  Kimball was a Harvard-educated journalist living in New York when she met Mark, a first-generation farmer, while researching a story on local, organic food.  She was immediately smitten with farming, and soon after with Mark.  The book is the story of their first tumultuous year of farming together.

For weeks, I couldn't get my mind off of Kimball's story.  I was convinced my infatuation with growing things would be short-lived, so I decided to test it by looking at some seed catalogs.  That would definitely be boring, and cure me for sure.  To my everlasting surprise, I was fascinated, and found myself pitching the idea of digging up a sizable chunk of the backyard for a vegetable garden.  My parents agreed, and thus began the intentional part of my garden adventure.