“I think I can count the years in my life on one hand when I didn’t have a garden,” Mom mused one morning as we were training cucumbers to vine away from the burgeoning cabbages. “One was when I had my apartment in medical school, one the year we lived in Arizona…but really, most all my life there’s been a garden, with raw vegetables waiting on the dinner table.”
Grandma and Grandpa (Mom’s folks) had both grown up on small, diversified farms in central Illinois during the Great Depression and WWII. Having a garden and growing their own food was an essential part of everyday life, along with knowing how to cook, bake, and preserve the harvest.
Later, as we were enjoying dinner together, Mom also noted as we savored a triple berry pie Kara had made, “When we as a family think of pie, we think of fruit pies. Many people, when they think of pie, think of chocolate chiffon or lemon meringue. We, instead, are reaching for the bowl of berries or the basket of apples for pie making because that’s what we’re harvesting.”
There’s nothing quite like having a garden to change your eating habits (unless you join a CSA program and receive regular shares that effectively bring the garden to you). Many crops practically beg munching while picking like snap peas, berries, or even rubbing the soil off a sweet carrot. And, every year, there is always something that grows as a bumper crop — swelling in so much plentifulness that you wonder where to stash it all.
Zucchinis are a common abundance crop. We grate zucchinis into our chocolate muffin batter, chop them up for sauté with cherry tomatoes and eggs for breakfast, put them on pizzas, and stir them into marinara. Vegetables for breakfast you may wonder? On the farm with a garden, of course!
I honestly can’t imagine cooking without a garden. Need some kale, go pick it. Need some new potatoes, go dig them. Have an overabundance of basil, make pesto and freeze it. Berries are in season, make jam. It has a rhythm that becomes reliable and something to look forward to as the reward after all the hard labor of putting in the garden. For instance, our jam-making season from late spring to fall looks something like this: strawberry rhubarb, strawberry, triple berry, blueberry, raspberry red currant, peach preserve, black currant, blackberry, chokecherry, crabapple, apple lemon, apple maple.
Having your own garden helps you identify plants, their growth habits, and how healthy or unhealthy traits present themselves. For instance, knowing what is a weed and what is crop is a good skill to have. We once had an intern who, when asked to weed a bed, weeded everything from the row, including what we’d sown that was coming up so nicely. Yes, at the end of the project, the weeds were gone, but so was the food source. Not all gardening skills come naturally.
Gardening teaches patience and persistence. It offers reward but not the instant gratification kind. Gardening is a great family activity, and it’s filled with potential science lessons — all the way from soil formations and microbiology to the life cycles of plants, pests, and pollinators. It can serve as a living laboratory (what happens if we grow squash in this part of the garden this year), a treasure hunt (find the cucumbers), and the biggest exercise room you’ll ever need. And there’s plenty of free helpings of vitamin D all summer long.
Are there drawbacks to gardening? Sure — sore backs, chafed hands, pest infestations, deer predation, blights, hail, washouts, poor soil health, sunburn, bug bites, and more. Gardening is no cakewalk (another reason to have that CSA membership because you get to skip these parts), but it’s a lifestyle choice that is part of where real food security happens — in our backyards, our kitchens, our freezers and pantries.
Having a garden unknits a piece of our reliance on the industrialized food system, which cares more about how the food looks and ships than on it having a soul, a story, or optimal health benefits. Nutritional decay in our foods is a real issue, making that which is picked and eaten the same day is a completely different nurturer of the body than that which was picked a month ago and kept in cold storage.
We need to find ways of reconnecting with gardens or transforming landscapes into foodscapes. Even if you didn’t create a garden this spring, you can begin the work now to prepare the soil, remove invasives, build raised beds, and turn in compost. You can begin now to learn about gardening or to connect with those who have market gardens in your area. You can visit a U-pick berry farm and learn to make jam. You can reclaim traditional food skills, even if they weren’t passed down from mother to daughter as they were in our family. You can work to build your own network of food security.
Having good nutrition shouldn’t be a luxury. My ancestors didn’t have much — certainly not as wealth — but they had good food that they grew and prepared themselves. We all should be able to have this, even when times are difficult, for they certainly were difficult during the Depression and the war. My advice as autumn approaches? Don’t wait for the panic of shortages and the trends of hoarding to think about food security — start thinking about it now while summer’s harvest is in its peak. Tend the process, learn and experiment, build the network, and feel that satisfaction our family has known in stocked shelves, filled chest freezers, and a table set with fresh deliciousness straight from the earth we tend.
This can be yours too — yes, even the wet, raw vegetables on the table, ready for munching. See you down on the farm sometime.
Laura Berlage is a co-owner of North Star Homestead Farms, LLC and Farmstead Creamery & Café. 715-462-3453; northstarhomestead.com.
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