“God almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.”
- Francis Bacon
Stepping out into my back yard after two long weeks of traveling, I was worried that my tiny garden would have shriveled up and died for lack of water, attention, and care. Nature has a fighting spirit, however, and I found sensuous San Marzano globes ripening on my tomato plants, exuberant leaf lettuce resisting its boundaries, and a mosh pit of red, white, and yellow onion greens weaving their way back and forth into one another. I sat down on the green plastic crate that is my all-weather garden seat, and I smiled at being back in my own tiny piece of green - my miniature oasis in the chaotic suburb where we make our home. Reaching out to touch the leaves, I sighed at how pretty it had grown and I silently thanked God for small blessings.
Five wooden garden frames constitute my back yard garden. Each is three feet wide and four feet long. A length of 1x4 makes up each side, and the four-inch-tall frame is placed upon its twin, so that the depth of each box is eight inches. Four of the frames are placed in a rectangle, two by two, with a three foot wide path running between - in total, a space about nine feet by nine, fenced in by a two-foot-tall white picket fence. To my left, lettuce is ready for tonight’s dinner. In the box catty-corner, strawberry plants, the berries spent. To my right, the wildly reaching onion greens, threatening with their pointy ends the peppermint that grows between it and the strawberries. In that far corner of my wee garden, a lonely sweet pepper hangs on its one-foot-tall plant - too rainy or too acidic the soil, I don’t rightfully know. The basil, however, is prolific.
As Francis Bacon observed, the garden predates man. In many traditions, man was born into a garden, then began to experiment and interact with its plants and trees. To cultivate the soil and propagate vegetation for consumption was the modus operandi of man once he decided to put down his own roots. Evolving beyond the hunter-gatherer, the farmer learned to make his food come to him, rather than being forced to go in search of his food. The family farm developed into an opportunity for trade, each farmer specializing in choice crops and bartering one’s corn with another’s wheat to round out his family’s table. Today, those family farms are an endangered species, crowded out by invasive corporate farms like King Ranch and Miller & Lux that partner with political and other corporate factions to control America’s perception of food and nutrition.
The garden - a universal symbol for life and growth and sustenance. It frightens me that smaller family farms are being subjugated under the clouds of mega-farms with their political affiliations, genetic modifications, and prolific chemical applications. It is common knowledge the dairy industry partnered with the government to push onto the American public a product that, according to The China Study, has increased heart disease and cancer exponentially - especially among women. GMOs are now prevalent in our grocery stores and it has become a challenge to avoid those which are harmful. Pesticides and hormones run rampant in commercial food production, where plants are “protected” from insects by the application of toxic substances and animals’ flesh made fleshier by the injection of hormones. The consumer, in turn, ingests those toxins and hormones, causing illness and free radicals to run rampant in our sensitive systems.
I can’t fight it all. That isn’t my hill to die on. I can, however, frequent my Mennonite friends’ stand at our farmer’s market, buy organic varieties of the “Dirty Dozen,” and plant my own little garden from which to make salads, salsas, and roasted veggies for my family. That much I can do.
Filled with satisfaction and recharged, silly as it might seem to some, by a brief sit in my own little world, I stand up, feeling the lines from the plastic crate still indented in my legs and backside. I take in the whole of it one more time and smile, grateful for the simple things in life.
