People who enjoy growing things will generally celebrate anything they invite to come out of the ground. Right now I’ve got the first green spears of daffodils emerging from the base of an oak tree, and if I lift up the sheets of matted leaves over the perennial beds, I’ll see all kinds of plants waking up and stretching toward the warmth and sun; plants I managed to forget in just one winter were even there.
Those daffy daffodils
I generally separate gardeners into two camps: those who primarily grow flowers and the others who grow vegetables, and in this time of hunger for many things, the vegetables are winning.
There will be no New England Flower Show in Boston for the first time in 137 years. The San Francisco and Northwest Flower Shows also closed this year, while the Southeast Flower Show in Atlanta survived but scaled way back. Our Home and Garden Show is underway at the State Fairgrounds this weekend with as much Home as Garden. It’s not exactly a mini version of the Philadelphia Flower Show, the oldest and best in the country and solely devoted to plants, plants, plants.
But the White House is getting it’s first vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt planted one during World War II. Today Michelle Obama joined some elementary students on the South Lawn to break ground for the plot which will help supply the White House kitchen with fresh produce. I wonder why it took a recession and a forward-thinking first family to do this. Gardening is backward in all great ways.
My Mom loved to garden. Her upbringing in Germany during the Greater-Depression-Than-This-One-S0-Far, and the second World War instilled a practical muscle that she exercised all her life, long after my folks had the means to spend a little more.
When I was very young, Mom gathered my two sisters and me in the station wagon every spring and drove to a farm implement store near Worcester to rent a tiller. I don’t recall how we were supervised all day as she ran that thing through an enormous area of the yard, 50 by 50 feet. Until I started my own little plot, the only clue my Mom’s feat was special was the reaction I got when I said she did a 50 by 50 foot garden. “Wow, that’s big”, I’d hear.
At the end of the day, my mother who was more frugal than she was exhausted loaded us little girls and the big machine into the car so she wouldn’t get stuck paying for another day of rental. For her to describe years later how difficult it was to load the tiller into the back of the station wagon by herself means it was impossible, but there was nothing she couldn’t do when her German determination took hold of her muscles and her wallet.
Thus began a season of toil that resulted in a crop of vegetables so large, Mom sent us with a little wagon around the neighborhood in late summer to sell the items at five and ten cents a piece. What wasn’t sold or eaten that night went into Mom’s home canning operation, which was as over-sized as the garden. All sizes and shapes of glass jars bearing concoctions of pickled this and preserved that, sat on blue painted wooden shelves that my Dad built in the basement. It was like a bunker down there. If the bomb fell, we could open jars for the rest of our lives. We’d turn into picalilli in the process, and the autopsies would later reveal vinegar in the place of blood, but we’d survive.
Today we can eat fresh produce all year long, even if we have to spend vast amounts of fossil fuels to get it here from South America. It’s what environmentalists call ” not sustainable”. They’d prefer we eat what is close by and in season, which can be lengthened by placing a few items in a pot by a sunny window.
Pruners, sheers and a basket of work gloves at the back door
It’s wonderful to see a resurgence of back yard vegetable gardening. I hope the Flower Shows return too because the fragrance and color and velvety touch of fresh flowers sustain us in a different way.
In the meantime, if you don’t want a garden of your own, take a drive to Schoolhouse Farms in Borodino. They open Memorial Day. The Malcolm family grows the most unique fresh items in the region, including heirloom tomatoes that will transform you. Here’s a link to their blog:
http://schoolhousefarms.blogspot.com/
Whether it’s vegetables, or flowers or simple herbs in a pot, here’s hoping you find some reason to get as dirty in your backyard in the coming months, as I get in mine.
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