kitchen garden/horticulture?

my backyard has been an anthropogenic artifact since at least 1975 when this house was built...from about 1999 until three years ago it was an artifact that had been left to biology to act on as it pleased which is why i am still in the process of clearing out russian olive bushes and locust trees and ubiquitous maple saplings and whatever else has taken root out there as i begin to manipulate the environment again...the aim is to convert at least half the yard to food production...just to see what i can do...a fair sized kitchen garden...i imagine people have been creating gardens ( as opposed to agriculture ) for quite some time and they seem fairly widespread...Buffalo-bird Woman grew sunflowers, maize squash, beans, and tobacco in her garden ( although it might be more horticulture...hers was much larger than mine will ever be )...as contact with europeans increased new plants came...potatoes for instance...even though they weren't a european crop..."at first we Hidatans did not like potatoes, because they smelled so strongly!...after three or four years , finding the indians did not have much taste for potatoes and seldom ate them, our agent made a big cache pit- a root cellar you say it was-and bought our potato crop of us. after this he would issue seed potatoes to us in the spring and in the fall we would sell our crop to him. thus handling potatoes each year, we learned little by little to eat them" [wilson 1917] food culture seems to be fairly conservative...diffusion of new crops is slow because acceptance is slow...most of what i have read indicates it is change through necessity as a rule...my carpatho-rusyn granny was a european ( her name was anna czomplak, just so we can put names to both gardeners )...and a contemporary of Buffalo-bird Woman...in her kitchen garden, in what was the austro-hungarian empire in those days, she grew cabbage, beets, turnips, carrots, and, just to show that there is cultural diffusion in foods ( as if you needed proof )my granny grew potatoes and sunflowers...i believe i covered some of the reasons behind the adoption of those foods so far from their point of domestication in an earlier blog...a peer of Buffalo-bird Woman in more than just time...and, i would suppose, more than just gardening...my kitchen garden provided lunch today...i went out and dug up some jerusalem artichokes...i cleaned them and set some aside to use in salads and then, no doubt to the horror of purists, i fried some in corn oil...sprinkled some garlic salt with parsley on them and ate the whole plate... i may never become a self-sufficient producer of food in my yard but i'll be feeding myself as much as i can from it...more stuff as it comes up.