Four Reasons

why you should grow a garden.

How about we start hot and heavy with the indisputable: God is a gardener. It’s cliche, but He did plant the Garden of Eden, and He told Adam how to take care of it. What I wouldn’t give to hear that advice on pruning! Imagine how different gardening would be without weeds and pests! I guess we will wait for the new creation for that reality. The therapy of gardening, for me, is the keeping of my garden. I spend hours just puttering, tying up vines with bits of string, clipping suckers off the tomatoes, checking on the broccoli plants to see if they have any dreaded cabbage worms, and yes, talking to my plants.

There is a term that has come up recently, called grounding. It is the description of the health benefits that are a result of being in contact with the pulses of the earth. There is some sketchy stuff out there about grounding, but I get what they are saying. In a world of virtual reality, we are not healthy in our spirits when we are involved in phone worship and removed from the realities of creation and the Creator. When warmth returns to the land there is no substitute for walking barefooted across the lawn to dig a hole to plant raspberries. It’s why my feet get tough and country. I have a hunch that hard times are coming for our food supply, and that in future the wisest people will be the ones who don’t care about flawless pedicures.

Check out the Instagram account of this photographer in Ukraine. She posts a lot of photos of bombed towns, of the elderly who choose to stay in their homes, of their gardens blooming in the foreground. Gardens are hope and resilience. Things continue to grow in some of the grimmest places. I remember many years ago when I went to Ukraine on a short term mission trip to distribute seeds. This was soon after communism fell, and the economy was shot. People were looking forward to planting their seeds. They were growing potatoes in the median strips between highway lanes. They were hanging onto hope, and that’s what they are doing now.

Gardening is a smart use of space. Doesn’t it make more sense to grow vegetables beside your house than to pay $5 a gallon on gas to mow the whole lawn? Maybe you don’t have much lawn, but that isn’t a good excuse. We have friends who have turned a tiny backyard in the city into a haven with plantings all around. They have a strawberry patch, a big variety of veggies, and sometimes they even grow sweet corn beside the privacy fence. They plant intensively and enjoy harvests from their hard work. Have you ever tasted the difference between a limp green bean from the grocery store and one picked fresh from the plant? How about a sun-warmed tomato versus the sorry shelf-stable ones we buy all winter? Or a cucumber that wasn’t wrapped in plastic? Gardens turn us into fruit and vegetable snobs, but not too snobby because we are grounded. Ha. That was a fun one.

At our recent family reunion I was talking with my aunt who has the greenest thumb of anybody I ever met. She is in her 60’s and still planting enough garden to feed a family of ten, according to my cousins. Last year she made a thousand dollars selling strawberries, and then she went out and bought a new stove for her kitchen. She was telling me that after she helps her husband with the milking, she relaxes in her garden, just pulling weeds and picking things. She is not afraid of food shortages because she knows what to do with a pack of seeds. Also, she has cows, but that’s another subject.

Granted, it can be discouraging when you have poor yields and outright crop failures, but if you chalk it up to learning, you’ll be smarter next season. I have a series of posts coming up on this subject, so if you’re not interested, prepare to be bored.

I should have posted this about a month ago, but late in the season is actually a great time to buy plants at discounts. If you bring home a spindly pepper and lovingly dig it a hole with space to expand, it will race to make up for lost time. How about you go out to the local greenhouse and find you some stuff that needs a bit of earth? Then tell me how it works out for you!