Garden Dreams and Garden Practicality

My husband Keith went and bought some seeds for our community garden plot. He bought seeds for two kinds of tomatoes, squash, beans, spinach, and peppers. I'm already dreaming ways to eat the produce, and we haven't even planted yet. Typical.

I'm not really a gardener. My Mom is, and I remember her coercing my sisters and me out to weed the garden behind our house. Hot hours crouched down in the humid Indiana summer, pulling weeds, didn't inspire my enthusiasm. I didn't make the connection between those hard hours of work and the food on our table. It seemed much easier to go to the grocery store to pick up carrots. As an adult, I've begun to find grocery shopping for produce grown in Chile or Australia or some other far off place bewildering and disturbing. I can't look at it anymore without wondering, what is the price in travel and labor for this food, so neatly piled up in the store? How much pesticide residue will my family and I consume, eating it? And, admittedly most compelling, will it even taste good?

When I lived in Guatemala, my host family had enough small plots of land to cultivate all of the corn they consumed in a year, and let me tell you, Guatemalans eat a lot of corn. They call themselves "the people of corn" and much of their culture revolves around the corn planting and harvest. As I lived with them and experienced their life, the corn tortillas and tamales we ate almost every day tasted better and better. All that hard work, all that loving and personal care for plants and the earth, I believe it tranfers to the food and the communion around the table.

I've come to regret that I didn't attend more closely to my mother's gardening, or other handy skills she wanted to teach me, like canning or sewing. In our current economic situation, I think such skills, the ones our grandparents knew well because they had to, are going to become vital again. I think that one of the best things we can do for future generations is teach them to garden, even as we teach them to use a computer. Here's a great article in Orion Magazine about this very issue: "A Bunny Runs Around a Tree," by Sandra Steingraber (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4259/).