There is something about growing my own food that I love. I relish the taste of a real, garden-grown, red, ripe tomato – whether it’s tossed with my salad, cooked into sauce, or eaten right off the vine, all warmed by the sun. I find great satisfaction in going out to the garden before dinner to see what looks good tonight – the beans or the zucchini or the broccoli. I love digging potatoes in the late summer days, searching for those Yukon golds in the dark dirt of my garden.
I have no illusion that I
could live off the land. I grow my own food in the summer, but I’m not much
good at canning it – and even if I were, I’ve a long way to go before what I
grow would sustain my family for more than a couple of weeks after the garden
is put to bed for the long Franconia winter. Nor could I survive, if lost in
the woods, by foraging on wild foods, because I have no idea which roots or
mushrooms or leaves are safe to eat and which would kill me.
I have no intention of ever
raising animals for meat. Chickens for eggs I consider all the time, but I
doubt I’ll ever convince my husband that it’s a good idea. But meat, no. My
brother and his girlfriend, over the course of two summers and autumns, have
raised three pigs. They’ve fed them and scratched their backs and watched their
quirky pig antics and given them a comfortable life. And they’ve butchered them
with the help of friends when it’s time to fill the smokehouse and the freezer.
My mother tended a large
backyard vegetable garden when I was a kid – rows of green beans and yellow,
carrots, corn, zucchini and summer squash and butternut, potatoes and beets. I
grew up eating fresh vegetables all summer and home-grown frozen ones into the
winter. I remember my brothers and me loading a little red wagon with an
overabundance of veggies and carting them through the neighborhood, selling squash
and cucumbers for pocket change. My brother, as a small boy, grew the biggest
and best tomatoes around.
In college I would return,
after a school year of dining hall food, to the garden freshness of home. Then
I moved to Colorado, and there was no garden in the high mountain town where I
lived, and where it is not unusual to see snow in summer. My roommates and I
planted pots of flowers, but no food. When the travelling farmers market was in
town, I’d happily bike over and buy a few items.
It took me a few years after
moving back East to build a garden of vegetables. I consider myself a novice
and learn a little bit each growing season. I try to add something different to
the garden each spring.
This year we discovered a
wide and thriving patch of blueberry bushes in the southeast slope of the
field. I could spend hours there picking those small, dark, sweet berries, and
we’ve been packing them into muffins and pancakes – and the freezer for later.
In the fall we gather apples from our gone-wild trees and the tamer one with
the wide branches at my in-laws’ house. These, we eat fresh or press into
cider.
In the late winter we tap
maple trees and boil the sap into one of New England’s best food products:
maple syrup. My husband and his brother and their father made syrup the
old-fashioned way when the boys were boys. They collected sap in buckets and
fired the evaporator with hardwood, sitting at the sugarhouse for the long
hours it took to cook the sap down. A few years ago my father-in-law had a
beautiful new sugarhouse built, and modern plastic tubing strung through the
sugar orchard to collect the sap. But sometimes we just make a few gallons in
our driveway, using the turkey fryer and a big soup pot. It’s all hard work.
And in the end, the syrup tastes just as sweet, and – despite the cost of
propane used to heat the pot – costs less the $20 per pint at the grocery
store.
Sometimes, food just tastes
better when you grow it, or make it, yourself.
Obviously my carbon footprint
– a catchphrase for those of us who like to think we are gentle to the earth – is
smaller when I go to my backyard for vegetables instead of to the grocery store
2 miles or 7 miles away, where the food comes from even further afield –
sometimes the farm down the road, often a country across the globe. But that’s
not why I plant a garden each spring.
I plant the garden because it
feels good, after a long winter, to dig in the muck. Pulling the weeds and
tilling the soil by hand and adding compost and forming rows is hard work, but
it is good work. Planting seeds and willing them to grow – not knowing if we’ll
have a late frost or a wet summer or a local drought or an infestation of those
annoying green caterpillars that eat broccoli leaves – is an act of hope and
faith.
I plant a garden because my
mother did – still does – and I hope that someday, when they are grown, my
children will, too.
I plant a garden because
vegetables grown there taste more real, like sunshine and earth, than the ones
you buy under florescent lighting.
I plant a garden – and harvest
wild berries – because months from now, when the days grow colder and darker,
there will be something tucked away in the freezer – green beans or blueberries
or pesto – that will still taste like summer.
I plant a garden because it
brings me joy.