In other words
I have a green thumb. Too bad it's green with envy, not ability
My father’s family tree is firmly planted on a Canadian prairie family farm. How could such a fertile gene pool of gardeners and farmers sprout someone so agriculturally challenged as me? Perhaps I have been genetically modified. I certainly can’t blame my upbringing.
Dad left behind the fertile fields of his youth when he embarked on his grand Canadian adventure. Years later, he put down roots in a Lower Mainland suburb but that didn’t stop him from plowing up the back yard. You can take the boy out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy; depending on my parents’ needs we also annoyed the neighbours with chickens and a cow.
My parents relied on their market garden to provide a year-round supply of produce (for eating fresh, frozen and canned) and to supplement the family income. Every summer, Mom hung a sign at the end of the driveway and set up shop in the garage where she sold produce, weighing it on a bathroom scale. If she liked you, she’d give you an extra cucumber. As a kid, I’d supplement my income by packing my bike carrier high with bags of tomatoes or pears and selling them door-to-door for 50 cents.
And dinosaurs browsed between the pea patch and the potato hills.
Many years and concrete yards later, I moved to Smithers and bought a house with a back yard large enough to support a decent-sized garden. My new place even had a greenhouse with shelves and a potting table. It was inevitable that I turn some sod and get dirty.
That summer, I spaded and hoed, weeded and pinched and strung string. I cultivated an aura of aged manure. By mid-August, I had a gorgeous crop of cauliflower-loving emerald-green caterpillars, and my cilantro hosted a precocious colony of aphids. The ladybugs were ecstatic. My pesticide aversion had created a creepy-crawly club med. I had started to read the books on growing gardens but stopped before the chapters on natural pest-control.
Having been beaten by the bugs without even putting up a fight I slunk back to the couch and decided to leave organic gardening to the experts. I’d grow flowery things instead. At least if the clematis got bugs I didn’t feel obliged to eat them. I could still go to the office with dirt embedded under my nails, proud that I retained a vestige of my prairie-farming genes. If I couldn’t eat what I grew, I could at least drink it in with my eyes. If the flowers didn’t grow, the only thing I’d regret was the empty wallet, not the empty root cellar.
Not that we have a root cellar. Yet.
With the price of fuel heading nowhere but north, I’ve reconsidered my vegetable gardening celibacy and am again flirting with the idea of a kitchen garden. Not a casual summer fling this time; this time the commitment would be for the long term.
I’ll give it a year. If the vegetables grow, and if I can grow enough to last a year, and if the vegetables actually last the year without growing fuzzy vegetables of their own…. I’ll do it again next year.
This time, I will research my topic more thoroughly. Talk to experienced gardeners. Read books by local experts. Tricia Kapelari’s Northword article on the $100 kitchen garden is a great place to start.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a cache of home-grown vegetables? I can imagine it: next spring, while the snow is still on the ground I go to the root cellar (or the basement fridge) and pick out a perfectly good cabbage. I’d combine it with some home-canned tomatoes (better buy a pressure cooker), and rice (not hoarded from Wal-Mart), and ground beef (we could keep a cow or two out back behind the garden) and cook up a big batch of cabbage rolls that I could then sell from a little stand at the end of my driveway!
Perhaps this apple didn’t fall so far from tree after all.
Your Comments on In other words
No one has commented yet on this article.