The popularity of gardening

My mother was a gardener as are my father and my wife. On the other hand, my own gardening experience began and ended with my annual hand-spading of Emma’s gardening space when I was a teenager. (Maybe I should add that I picked salmonberries from our backyard in Juneau, and also raspberries from a bush in Bozeman before I had my trophy room built in its place. But in either case I think that would be a stretch to call berry-picking “gardening,” particularly since I didn’t even plant the bushes!)

Still, it interests me that gardening appeals to so many people. I see the first vestiges of it while returning from Manitoba and Saskatchewan in June — the manicured gardens laid out with precision in the coal-black soil of prairie towns in those two provinces and in small town North Dakota. These gardeners obviously do it right, without a weed in sight … sort of like a well-painted house or finely finished gunstock — nothing sloppy or haphazard.

If what I read in Sunday newspaper inserts and feature stories, gardening is now in vogue — the producing of one’s own food. What a novel concept! Michelle Obama is even doing it! Yet, I remember seeing those gardens every year in Canada and North Dakota for decades. Their owners garden in the absence of fashion. They plant gardens because harvesting their own produce and canning vegetables from their very own garden has become a way of life for them. I suspect also that they love gardening, and would find the summer incomplete without tending to a plot of earth.

It would be the same for me to contemplate an autumn where I didn’t shoot some pheasants and a deer or two. I have lived such autumns and found them sorely lacking.

And so it is as Garrison Keillor once said, “This is the time when the gardens are coming on strong … people leaving tomatoes on neighbors’ porches in the middle of the night.”

At our house, we have been eating lettuce, spinach, and spicy mesclun greens almost daily since June. Jake in Jamestown grows the best onions I’ve ever eaten, also lettuce, and now he is busy canning tomatoes and pickles from his garden. Every time I visit him, he sends a couple dozen jars along with me. (I think we are still working on canned tomatoes from 2007.)

Laurie’s green beans and yellow beans are growing so much it is astonishing! Every day she brings in a bucket of beans, blanches them, lays them on cookie sheets to quick freeze in the chest freezer, then brings them into the house and shrink-wraps packages of beans before returning them to the freezer. She has frozen more than 30 packages thus far and the bean plants are still producing.

The beets are thriving this year too. Laurie picks beet greens, and later, after they grow a bit more, the beets themselves. Next will be the squash from a single plant, and fresh tomatoes from her three plants.

Laurie’s technique has been to plant her modest 23’ X 7’ garden by late May. “I spend the first month planting, weeding, watering and fertilizing,” she says. “When the vegetable plants outpace the weeds, I just water occasionally and let things grow.”

She spent $57 on tilling, seeds, plants and miscellaneous herbs, and claims her return is “better than what I’ve gotten in the stock market.”

It causes me to remember one time when I calculated the per pound cost of the pheasants I had taken that season. I think it was close to $20 a pound. Of course, economics doesn’t play much of a part in the reasons why I hunt pheasants or deer or elk or anything else.

I suspect the same could be said for most gardeners.

Tags: bernie kuntz, outdoors, gardening