Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect to strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
On Tuesday, I attended a presentation at the college by the Three Rivers Planning & Development District. Naturally, Toyota’s decision to postpone its Prius plant in Blue Springs was the main thing on everyone’s mind. The presenters and probably everyone else in the room were steadfast in their belief that the Toyota plant was only “delayed” and would eventually be built. Still, Randy Kelly, the Director of TRPDD, did say that if Toyota pulled out for good, we “might ought to find our grandfather and learn how to make a garden with a shovel because the entire international economic system has just gone ‘kaflooey.’ ” I think he was on the right track with the shovel part.
It was actually my grandmother who made the garden, as my grandfather had emphysema from years of smoking in his youth that left him winded from walking across the yard. All I can remember him doing garden-wise was sharpening the hoe for my grandmother. I’m sure he made many a garden in his younger years, but he was an old man when I knew him. Born in 1885, he never traveled very far from where he was born, in Union County. As far as I know, he left the state of Mississippi only once, to go on vacation with his son’s family to Tampa, Florida. He wasn’t a very likeable sort of man---gruff and judgmental. He thought the world was a tough place. In one of the few moments we actually conversed, he told me his ambition had been to become a doctor. He must have respected those country doctors who were there for difficult deliveries and farm accidents. Growing up in Mississippi in the late 1800s afforded little or no opportunity for a sharecropper’s son with five siblings to consider medical school.
Enough about the grandfather---what about that shovel? Making a garden with a shovel is the most honorable sort of work. It teaches self-reliance and honesty much better than any factory job, whether making upholstered furniture or building electric cars. As I said before, it's time for some honesty, especially about how we make our living. The source of human life and prosperity is in the sun and the soil, not in the corporate boardroom.
I myself have made several gardens using a shovel, hoe, and garden fork. In fact, I put in a small garden every time I had a backyard. When I was a student at MSU, I made a raised bed out of a few concrete blocks behind my apartment and grew okra and squash. In Baltimore, I tried to grow some things in the backyard of our house on Guilford Ave., but it was too shady, and I was too busy with graduate school to spend much time back there. My best expatriate gardens were in California.
Since my grandfather’s time, things have changed in Mississippi---some for the better, some for the worse. Despite our problems, we no longer have the deep-seated, near-universal racism of his time. I would agree that the progress we’ve made in social relations is an unequivocally good thing. When we eradicate homophobia the way we’ve sent racism into hiding, we can allow for a short celebration. However, the story we tell ourselves about progress has some flaws. Mainly, the notion is associated with planes, trains, and automobiles, and the assumption is that these marvels will only grow more marvelous, and we are just going to enjoy more and more technological wonders. Very few people even talk about basic human needs like food or the strangeness of living in a wealthy, powerful country like the US, yet knowing people who don’t have enough to eat and knowing plenty more whose diets will eventually cause their deaths of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. In fact, in my biology and A&P classes, I find many students who do not even know diet has anything to do with cancer.
Today, the food on an average American plate travels about 1,500 miles from field to table. Pork might come from Iowa or North Carolina; potatoes from eastern Washington or Idaho; “fresh” vegetables from Mexico; and wine from Chile or South Australia. Meanwhile, the happy family sitting at table wears clothes made in Honduras and Indonesia. As important as clothes are, the food is a much more serious issue. Food is a basic human need, second only to water as a matter of urgent importance. That 1,500-mile, global distribution system reminds me of military supply lines. Cut those lines, and the invading army is done for. Just ask Napoleon. Cut our food supply lines, and we’re no longer the “sole remaining superpower.” We’re just as miserable and desperate as any other hungry population.
The precariousness of our food system is not because of the distance itself. It’s because of the amount of oil that’s needed to get it to the kitchen. Our farming system has become utterly dependent on fossil fuels. Oil runs the tractors and provides the raw materials to make pesticides and herbicides, while nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. While this has enabled increased productivity by some measures---it’s obvious that many fewer farmers are now needed to supply food for increasing numbers of people, it also makes food dependent on oil. If oil runs out, so will food. Oil isn’t going to run out any time soon, but world oil production has peaked, resulting in increasing prices and more price volatility, which is reflected in food prices too. Compounding the problem is the move toward biofuels, which usually means ethanol from corn and diesel from soybean oil. Acreage used for biofuels is acreage that’s taken out of production of food for humans to eat. The words ignore and ignorance are obviously related. Our leaders are not ignorant of our food security situation, but they are ignoring it, which is sometimes known as “willful ignorance.”
Sort of parallel to the story of progress in the American mind is the respect we’ve always had for self-reliance. Thoreau took self-reliance to the extreme, and I admire him for it. Generations of pioneers and frontier people learned to value frugality, live within their means, and even save money. Many a patriarch has died in farm country supposedly penniless, only to leave behind a staggering fortune. Now, progress as we’ve known it has run self-reliance off the road. Many of the students I teach think gardens are quaint, although they’d never use that word. Gardens are associated with their grandparents. In their minds, their futures involve working for someone else to make enough money to buy what they need at Wal-Mart. To them, self-reliance means spending your whole life working at the factory so that you don’t have to depend on government assistance. I guess that’s a form of independence, and it’s admirable as far as it goes. Why isn’t it just as bad to depend on corporations in Atlanta, New York, or Tokyo? When self-reliance is a foreign concept, the land of the free won’t be so for very much longer.
Steve Solomon is the founder of Territorial Seeds, the premier source for quality seeds for gardeners in the Pacific Northwest. In "Gardening When it Counts," he describes in detail how to transform a hayfield (or a lawn) into a garden and how to design that garden to produce food the first time and every time. Not everything he describes will work well in Mississippi. We can grow Southern peas easily, but English peas (i.e., green shelling peas) only with some difficulty and advance planning. We can grow peanuts and sweet potatoes, but Irish potatoes are hit-or-miss. Our soils are eroded and worn out from years of repeat cropping of cotton and soybeans. And, of course, we have our own particular insect pests to deal with over the course of our summers when it may or may not rain for a month at a time. There are other great resources, but most gardening books deal with ornamentals or hobby gardens, not vegetable gardening and certainly not grain production on a small scale. There isn’t a single vegetable gardening book of similar breadth and depth as Solomon’s that’s written for the South. Even if there were one, no gardening book can tell you how to grow food on your own site and be 100% sure of success. That knowledge comes only from practice. So, talk to your grandfathers who knew how to grow their own food when they had to, and talk to the few real farmers still living among us before they die.
Remember, keep your shovels sharp and your hoes sharper.
On Tuesday, I attended a presentation at the college by the Three Rivers Planning & Development District. Naturally, Toyota’s decision to postpone its Prius plant in Blue Springs was the main thing on everyone’s mind. The presenters and probably everyone else in the room were steadfast in their belief that the Toyota plant was only “delayed” and would eventually be built. Still, Randy Kelly, the Director of TRPDD, did say that if Toyota pulled out for good, we “might ought to find our grandfather and learn how to make a garden with a shovel because the entire international economic system has just gone ‘kaflooey.’ ” I think he was on the right track with the shovel part.
It was actually my grandmother who made the garden, as my grandfather had emphysema from years of smoking in his youth that left him winded from walking across the yard. All I can remember him doing garden-wise was sharpening the hoe for my grandmother. I’m sure he made many a garden in his younger years, but he was an old man when I knew him. Born in 1885, he never traveled very far from where he was born, in Union County. As far as I know, he left the state of Mississippi only once, to go on vacation with his son’s family to Tampa, Florida. He wasn’t a very likeable sort of man---gruff and judgmental. He thought the world was a tough place. In one of the few moments we actually conversed, he told me his ambition had been to become a doctor. He must have respected those country doctors who were there for difficult deliveries and farm accidents. Growing up in Mississippi in the late 1800s afforded little or no opportunity for a sharecropper’s son with five siblings to consider medical school.
Enough about the grandfather---what about that shovel? Making a garden with a shovel is the most honorable sort of work. It teaches self-reliance and honesty much better than any factory job, whether making upholstered furniture or building electric cars. As I said before, it's time for some honesty, especially about how we make our living. The source of human life and prosperity is in the sun and the soil, not in the corporate boardroom.
I myself have made several gardens using a shovel, hoe, and garden fork. In fact, I put in a small garden every time I had a backyard. When I was a student at MSU, I made a raised bed out of a few concrete blocks behind my apartment and grew okra and squash. In Baltimore, I tried to grow some things in the backyard of our house on Guilford Ave., but it was too shady, and I was too busy with graduate school to spend much time back there. My best expatriate gardens were in California.
Since my grandfather’s time, things have changed in Mississippi---some for the better, some for the worse. Despite our problems, we no longer have the deep-seated, near-universal racism of his time. I would agree that the progress we’ve made in social relations is an unequivocally good thing. When we eradicate homophobia the way we’ve sent racism into hiding, we can allow for a short celebration. However, the story we tell ourselves about progress has some flaws. Mainly, the notion is associated with planes, trains, and automobiles, and the assumption is that these marvels will only grow more marvelous, and we are just going to enjoy more and more technological wonders. Very few people even talk about basic human needs like food or the strangeness of living in a wealthy, powerful country like the US, yet knowing people who don’t have enough to eat and knowing plenty more whose diets will eventually cause their deaths of heart disease, stroke, and cancer. In fact, in my biology and A&P classes, I find many students who do not even know diet has anything to do with cancer.
Today, the food on an average American plate travels about 1,500 miles from field to table. Pork might come from Iowa or North Carolina; potatoes from eastern Washington or Idaho; “fresh” vegetables from Mexico; and wine from Chile or South Australia. Meanwhile, the happy family sitting at table wears clothes made in Honduras and Indonesia. As important as clothes are, the food is a much more serious issue. Food is a basic human need, second only to water as a matter of urgent importance. That 1,500-mile, global distribution system reminds me of military supply lines. Cut those lines, and the invading army is done for. Just ask Napoleon. Cut our food supply lines, and we’re no longer the “sole remaining superpower.” We’re just as miserable and desperate as any other hungry population.
The precariousness of our food system is not because of the distance itself. It’s because of the amount of oil that’s needed to get it to the kitchen. Our farming system has become utterly dependent on fossil fuels. Oil runs the tractors and provides the raw materials to make pesticides and herbicides, while nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. While this has enabled increased productivity by some measures---it’s obvious that many fewer farmers are now needed to supply food for increasing numbers of people, it also makes food dependent on oil. If oil runs out, so will food. Oil isn’t going to run out any time soon, but world oil production has peaked, resulting in increasing prices and more price volatility, which is reflected in food prices too. Compounding the problem is the move toward biofuels, which usually means ethanol from corn and diesel from soybean oil. Acreage used for biofuels is acreage that’s taken out of production of food for humans to eat. The words ignore and ignorance are obviously related. Our leaders are not ignorant of our food security situation, but they are ignoring it, which is sometimes known as “willful ignorance.”
Sort of parallel to the story of progress in the American mind is the respect we’ve always had for self-reliance. Thoreau took self-reliance to the extreme, and I admire him for it. Generations of pioneers and frontier people learned to value frugality, live within their means, and even save money. Many a patriarch has died in farm country supposedly penniless, only to leave behind a staggering fortune. Now, progress as we’ve known it has run self-reliance off the road. Many of the students I teach think gardens are quaint, although they’d never use that word. Gardens are associated with their grandparents. In their minds, their futures involve working for someone else to make enough money to buy what they need at Wal-Mart. To them, self-reliance means spending your whole life working at the factory so that you don’t have to depend on government assistance. I guess that’s a form of independence, and it’s admirable as far as it goes. Why isn’t it just as bad to depend on corporations in Atlanta, New York, or Tokyo? When self-reliance is a foreign concept, the land of the free won’t be so for very much longer.
Steve Solomon is the founder of Territorial Seeds, the premier source for quality seeds for gardeners in the Pacific Northwest. In "Gardening When it Counts," he describes in detail how to transform a hayfield (or a lawn) into a garden and how to design that garden to produce food the first time and every time. Not everything he describes will work well in Mississippi. We can grow Southern peas easily, but English peas (i.e., green shelling peas) only with some difficulty and advance planning. We can grow peanuts and sweet potatoes, but Irish potatoes are hit-or-miss. Our soils are eroded and worn out from years of repeat cropping of cotton and soybeans. And, of course, we have our own particular insect pests to deal with over the course of our summers when it may or may not rain for a month at a time. There are other great resources, but most gardening books deal with ornamentals or hobby gardens, not vegetable gardening and certainly not grain production on a small scale. There isn’t a single vegetable gardening book of similar breadth and depth as Solomon’s that’s written for the South. Even if there were one, no gardening book can tell you how to grow food on your own site and be 100% sure of success. That knowledge comes only from practice. So, talk to your grandfathers who knew how to grow their own food when they had to, and talk to the few real farmers still living among us before they die.
Remember, keep your shovels sharp and your hoes sharper.
This was better reading than the your previous dual citizenship declaration. Where did you live in California and what did you try to grow in your vegetable garden when you lived there? I am shocked because I have only heard about the fruits and nuts out there. I would love to hear more of your Granddad, seems he was as much a victim of timely circumstances and education like most people in this country since the 1600's. I would bet he might have been more intelligent than you give him credit for besides the fact that you went to college and used his dna to complete your studies means or meant a whole lot to him I would bet. I do like your article and will read it a few more times, not that I obviously agree with everything however, your insights to diet might have me hanging on this 'Flog' food log. Yes I coined the phrase myself just now! Thank you and keep your applause to the minimum please. I would love to hear more of your grandparents and parents they sound a lot like mine and we could be related!
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