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Just Don’t Plant Any!
Part 1
One of them use to be growing your own…
‘Victory Garden’
As they were called back in the old days.
Today we refer to them as…
“Holy cow, I planted a seed in some dirt and it grew into something I could eat!”
Yes this once great American past-time has faded over the years for most Americans.
“It seems like a whole lot of work if you ask me.”
“Growing a Garden?”
“What on Earth for?”
“Especially when all the vegetables I would plant can be easily purchased at any of my local grocery stores.”
“So why would I take on such a project?”
Later in this Post I will give you several reasons why I will consider taking on such a project as planting my own…
‘Victory Vegetable Garden’
Our Super Markets offer a wide variety of vegetables all year round.
At reasonable prices.
We’ve become use to the ease of buying what we want when we want it.
Supermarket shelves are always loaded with a cornucopia of the veggies that we all love so much.
Besides…who has time to take on such a time consuming task as planting a garden?
We all have jobs to go to…gotta pay those bills.
Then there’s the kids and everything they have to do.
Numerous responsibilities and obligations each and every day.
We hardly have any time to spend with our families.
And forget about any individual personal time.
What a bunch of ‘Woosies’ we’ve become.
Including myself!
“I have no time to do this.”
“There’s no time to do that.”
“Wha…Wha…Wha!”
I’m sure glad our Fore-Fathers didn’t have this ‘Give-Up’ attitude.
Imagine this kind of attitude being applied to the daily life they were faced to forge through.
“Gee Ma, haven’t they built that Walmart down on the lower 40 yet?”
“I’m just not in the mood to…”
“Chop some wood so we don’t freeze to death from this cold.”
“I just don’t feel like hunting for any food for our table today.”
“Besides, who wants to spend most of the day gutting and cleaning the catch, then having to prepare it to eat?”
“And for sure I’m not in the mood to till a piece of land all day just to plant seeds for us to grow veggies!”
It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight to behold.
Not a pretty sight at all.
“Ma, are you sure they haven’t built that Walmart yet?”
It seems these days no one wants to do anything that takes up their time or requires personal labor.
Cooking from scratch.
Making the gifts you give to others on Holidays and special occasions.
Writing Letters…with pen and paper.
Working on your own car.
And yes…growing a Garden.
Or Not…
There are so many Articles, Videos and ‘How To’ Posts on the Internet about growing a Vegetable Garden these days.
And the amount of Books that are available to read about the subject is numbing.
There is so much information out there coming from so many people.
Everyone of them giving you an in depth overview and endless Tips, Theories, Techniques, Themes and Testimonials.
All claiming that their guidelines of Gardening is the ONLY information you’ll ever need to growing a successful Garden.
Follow their plan and you can’t go wrong.
That’s until you read the next persons version of the perfect Garden.
They will claim that everything you just read in your last article, from that other guy…is all wrong!
You must do it their way or face complete failure.
They will tell you…
And I do mean everything about Gardening.
So much information.
So little time.
Have you the time to read lots of books and articles?
Most of them repeating what was said in the last article or book you just finished reading.
They will explain everything to you.
The soil and it’s proper condition.
The weather and your plants.
Your climate area and how it effects your plants.
The suns cycle: Where do you fit in?
The seeds: How to choose the right ones.
Proper planting of your seeds.
How to care for your plants.
Watering…the proper technique.
The weeding.
Then there’s the harvesting…bla, bla, bla.
I mean how many ways can you say…
“Plants need soil, water, sun and air”?
So…
…could I possibly add to the list of what to do to create the ‘Best Garden In The World?’
If you are like me you would just want to plant some seeds and eat the results…right?
My version of a Garden would be to make everything as simple as I can.
I would try to avoid as much work as I could during….
the designing…
the building…
the planting…
the caring…
and the harvesting of the Garden.
The only thing I would want to spend as much time as possible on would be…
EATING ALL THAT I GREW!
I’m really not interested in all the technical aspects of gardening.
Or even about the history and life of the vegetables I would plan to plant.
I’ve been buying and eating them for many years.
So I can assume that I have some knowledge of what to expect as an end result to anything I would plant.
Well…
…maybe I’d be interested in some of the technical aspects.
Enough that I wouldn’t kill everything I’d try to grow including…
myself or my family.
As promised, here are two reasons why I am considering planting a vegetable garden.
One day while reminiscing with my wife Robin about how good the fruits and vegetables tasted when we were children.
Compared to what they taste, or the lack of taste like these days.
We talked for awhile on the subject trying to pin point when we noticed the “TASTE” change.
Also asking “Why and What brought this change about?”
After a lengthy discussion on both matters…neither question could be answered.
With that our lives moved on and we continued to go about our daily business as usual.
Several hours later though I was taking a walk around my yard.
I was planning my attack for the projects that I planned on doing the next morning.
Mowing the grass, edging, weeding…the usual routine.
As I walked around the yard I found myself thinking about the conversation Robin and I had earlier.
The one about tasteless fruit and vegetables.
This lead me to recall one of my many memories from my childhood.
I was thinking back to the time I planted my very first Vegetable Garden.
I was ten years of age.
What inspired me to want to grow a Vegetable Garden at that age…I haven’t the slightest idea.
All I knew was I had a hankering to grow me one.
I think I wanted to be a farmer at that time.
That was right before I wanted to be a Fireman.
This was followed by wanting to be a World Wide Wrestling Champion.
Youth…the wonder of it all.
I worked for months on that little Garden I planted.
Tending to it every day after school and on the weekends.
My personal little achievement in the world.
I’m not sure where the knowledge came from.
I remember asking only a few questions about planting a Garden.
It just seemed that I knew what to do.
I’m sure that during my schooling the basic concepts of gardening were introduced in various forms.
During Science Class I suppose.
Ah, my first time playing in the dirt with a purpose other than making mud pies and mud diving.
My area of choice for my garden was limited.
Actually I had no choice at all.
We had a small back yard and the thought of a ten year old child digging up the yard.
This was too much for my parents to handle.
I was shown the area where my garden was to be dug.
The size was determined for me also…five foot by five foot.
Boy did I hate digging up the area I was assigned.
There were so many rocks and roots…it was hard work.
I struggled as I busted my butt digging out that five by five piece of ground.
As a reward I received my very first hand blister from the digging with that old wooden handled shovel we had.
When I was done digging I looked with such pride at my accomplishment.
Imagining each seed I was going to plant sprouting and turning into a future menu item.
My family would be so proud and all the neighbors envious.
What I actually had was a five foot by five foot square cut out of the grass leaving a pile of dirt and rocks.
To top this off the Garden was right next to our yards fifty five gallon Burn Barrel.
We had to burn our trash in those days
There was no Trash Trucks driving around once or twice a week to pick up your household trash…Oh No!
You either took your trash to the dump yourself or you burned it yourself.
The choice was yours.
Most people had a big old rusted fifty five gallon barrel in their back yard for burning their trash.
Boy those were the days.
My brother and I use to watch and listen for the longest time as the fire would burn the trash.
At night time you could see many of your neighbors yards glowing from their Burning Barrels.
With the occasional burst of flame, sometimes shooting up to six or eight feet high.
And the thrill of bottles exploding from the heat of the fire.
It was always a great night.
What can I say?
We didn’t have Computer Games to entertain us…heck we didn’t even have a TV at that time.
So a flare up of fire followed by exploding bottles…it didn’t get any better than that.
Before getting off this subject of burning your trash or having to take it to the dump yourself.
I have to tell you this about something that…
WAS PICKED UP.
If we had to burn our trash…what did we do with our food waste?
The food scraped off your plates after a meal.
The raw trimmings of meat, fat, bones, rotten vegetables…all your food wastes.
Down the Garbage Disposal you say.
WRONG!
We didn’t have them…not invented yet.
So?
On the side of your house was a metal cylinder in the ground with a cover.
This metal cylinder cover had a foot pedal you pressed with your foot to open.
Inside the cylinder was a removable bucket with a handle.
Oh yeah…what your thinking is correct.
You would dump your food waste into the bucket everyday.
Once a week…let me repeat that again so you get the full visual effect and fragrance as I describe the rest to you.
Once a week a truck, that sort of looked like a trash truck of today, would come through your neighborhood.
You never had a problem knowing when they were near your street getting ready to pick up your…
‘SWILL’
That’s what they called your food waste.
“Swill”…who thinks up these words?
The truck that picked up the ‘swill’ was called the ‘HONEY WAGON’.
Believe me ‘Honey’ had nothing to do with the smell.
A man would get out of the truck.
Come to the side of your house to your swill bucket.
Take the bucket out and dump it into the truck .
Then return the bucket to the cylinder by your house.
All the time this is going on…juice from the truck is dripping onto the street.
Usually a nice size puddle has formed by the time the truck leaves.
It was the most horrific smell you could imagine.
After they would leave the smell lingered around for hours.
This was due to the trail of liquid that leaked out of the ‘Honey Wagon’ from the lovely products fermenting inside.
They left a trail throughout the entire neighborhood.
You couldn’t…
…the stench.
If you got stuck behind a Honey Wagon while you were out driving your car.
Let me just say that…actually there isn’t anything I can say about what a terrible situation you’d be in.
As the trucks would leave the neighborhood to deliver their booty to surrounding farms for them to use for feed for their pigs, etc..
My brother or I were made to go to the street and hose down the puddles they left behind.
I have to mention this.
By the fourth and for sure by the fifth day while waiting for the ‘Honey Wagon’ to make it’s weekly pickup.
When you would dump your swill into the swill bucket, it would always be loaded with…
‘MAGGOTS’
That’s right…
‘Maggots’.
Thousands of them.
All squirming around in that can eating the swill.
To this day I don’t know how those guys that drove those trucks and picked up our ‘swill’ did that job.
I also I don’t know how I ever slept at night as a child after seeing what was in the swill bucket by pickup day.
I can almost smell that smell again just thinking about it.
It doesn’t take much imagination to recall the visuals either.
M-M-M-M, what’s for lunch?
Thank goodness someone invented…
“THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL”
Hopefully this next memory will be a little more pleasant than the last one I just covered.
The last Garden I planted was many, many years ago before the divorce from my first wife.
I’m sorry…before my first wife divorced me.
It was a typical in the ground Garden.
A large rectangle filled with rows and mounds for the veggies, and a lot of work for me.
All that exposed ground allowing my new found friends THE WEEDS, to grow at their leisure.
So much time was spent weeding that garden.
I had some really good luck with it though…until the divorce.
Then my luck ran out.
The X got a boyfriend.
They got the Garden.
I got the boot.
But I’m a firm believer that if something gives you a good result…do it again.
So with that in mind…
I gave it another try.
I remarried and planted another garden
Both turned out much better the second time around.
Secondly…while thinking about that first and last gardens, I recalled eating my very first pickings.
Everything I picked wasn’t quite ready yet for harvesting.
I just couldn’t wait any longer.
For weeks I watched as tiny vegetables started to grow in my garden.
Each passing day the fruit of my efforts were starting to look more like the glorious vegetable they were to become.
And their colors and fragrances.
Time was close enough!
I picked two tomatoes, two small pieces of lettuce, a cucumber, a green pepper and three radish.
No one was home so I had the kitchen all to myself.
With a knife in hand I cut those veggies all up just the way I liked.
Next I mixed in some mayonnaise, salt and pepper and was ready to eat the first salad that I had grown.
Describing the taste that I experienced next with my first bite of that salad is almost impossible.
Let me just say…
“I haven’t tasted nothing like it since”.
I felt so proud of myself to have accomplished such a feat at such a young age.
The tomatoes were so juicy that when I was done eating the salad there was all this juice at the bottom of the bowl.
Mixed in with the mayo and flavors of the veggies…I drank it all.
When I was done…
I licked the bowl clean.
After recalling that wonderful thought and remembering the wife’s and my conversation about the lack of flavor in today’s veggies.
It was decided!
I WILL ONCE AGAIN GROW A VEGETABLE GARDEN!
If only to taste a real tomato again…it will be worth it.
So here I am committing myself to another project only to realize later the time and effort that were to be required.
“What have I gotten myself into now?”
But once I commit to something…I commit totally.
So a Garden it is!
This is the end of Part 1 of my continuing story of the effort I will go through to…
‘Grow a vegetable garden in the 21st Century’
Will I succeed?
In the end will there be a salad served with dinner?
Will there be vegetables served with that dinner?
Who knows?
We will all have to wait and see…
including myself.
Come back soon to read Part 2 of this quest…
– WHERE TO BEGIN –
as soon as it is posted.
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