Views
Biodiversity and the GLTBQ Community
Kitch-en Gardens or Virgin Mary and the Seven Gnomes
Spring Gardening
Spring Gardening
by Karen Kerin
I am a gardener, and every spring causes my enthusiasm for working the earth to rise like the maple sap that comes only a few weeks earlier. Nothing can compare to getting my fingers into the loam of the garden and working the soil to a smooth consistency ready for my seeds and plants. Peas and potatoes want that early start followed by onions and the rest of the crop as the weather improves and the threat of frost diminishes.
But this year is somehow different. What appears to be a drought threatens our having the water to assure a harvest. Time to garden is increasingly nibbled away by duties and commitments to a variety of diverse interests. The balance of my needs versus those of others weighs heavily as so many of the things I do find me a minority voice of reason. No not the minority that immediately might spring to your mind, but rather the minority of being the only technically educated person on a committee or work group. It puts me too often in the role of the teacher.
Diet, too, is having an impact on my gardening. Having become a diabetic, potatoes and other starchy vegetables have lost their desirability. New peas from my own garden are now toxic because they are both a source of sugar and a source of carbohydrates that metabolize into sugar. That is not a good idea for a diabetic. Beets fall in the same category, but the beet greens are super and I can have all I want. So on the diet front, it is largely the salad fixings that make a lot of sense for me to grow. The greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, my herbs, cabbage and broccoli are high on my list.
I used to start my own plants when I had the sunny windows to do that, but my current digs don’t have those sunny windows. That means buying the plants, which nips my early gardening desires in the bud and to a degree diminishes the economic benefits of gardening. Still, I cling to the idea that the stuff I grow is healthier and I think it tastes better. Some of my city friends pooh-pooh my notions of organic produce being healthier, pointing out that the plants have to contain all the same stuff, whether grown organically as I do or with chemical fertilizers. I used to disagree, but now I just accept that it tastes better, and because it is fresher, it is more nutritious. The city folks can have their supermarket clones of the good stuff. I can have what I like and we can agree to disagree and be happy in doing what we think is best.
On a more serious note, the one thing that happens to all of us who garden is the surplus crop. When my family was young, I planted a dozen hills of patty pan summer squash that produced bushels of the weird looking fruit. They are white, shaped like a discus and have serrated edges. Not exactly an ugly bit of produce, but somehow rather alien looking and decidedly unfamiliar to the neighborhood cooks. We ate a lot of them, but the yield was far in excess of what we could consume. Nobody wanted to take them or perhaps they would take one to be polite. It became a real problem because the squash was accumulating at an alarming rate. We gave them to the church for the poor until we were told they no longer had folks who would take them. Ultimately, the squash became supplemental feed for the four pigs I was raising.
Now you might wonder why I bother to tell you about my bumper crop of squash. It was only a bit worse than the year that my sweet corn, and every one else’s, produced an incredible crop. The answer is the bumper crop of anything is a time for sharing. With the war on terror in full swing, many young families have one or both parents serving the country in distant places. Many have small children and their incomes are reduced while active duty keeps them out of the private sector where their incomes are often double what the military pays. We gardeners will have a bumper crop of something this year, hopefully not weeds. Since we are all the targets of terrorism, wouldn’t it be nice if we could organize an effort to provide our excess production to the families whose bread-winners are protecting us and our enjoyment of gardening?
Karen Kerin is a candidate for the Republican nomination for Vermont’s lone Congressional seat. She lives in South Royalton.