Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise - Softcover

Owens, Michele

 
9781609614461: Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1609614461 ISBN 13: 9781609614461
Verlag: Rodale Books, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A lively, passionate argument for the backyard vegetable garden, drawing on science, history, and stories from the author's garden.

Our parents saw supermarkets and processed foods as the height of convenience. But nothing is more convenient than grocery shopping in the backyard. A vegetable garden offers the best defense against rising food prices, the most environmentally sound way to eat, and better exercise than any gym. It will turn anyone into a wonderful cook, since nothing tastes more vibrant than homegrown. And it can take less time every week than a trip to the supermarket.

In Grow the Good Life, Michele Owens, an amateur gardener for almost two decades, makes an entertaining and persuasive case for vegetable gardens. She starts with two simple but radical ideas: Growing food on a small scale is easy, and it is absurdly rewarding.

With her wry, funny, and accessible approach, Owens helps beginning gardeners overcome obstacles that keep them from planting a few seedlings every spring. She explains why dirt isn't dirty; the health benefits of growing one's own food; and that vegetable gardens are not antithetical to the frantic pace of modern life, but simple and undemanding if intelligently managed.

Grow the Good Life is not just another how-to. Instead, it will teach you the true fundamentals of vegetable growing: how to fit a garden into your life and why it's worth the trouble.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHELE OWENS is a cofounder of Garden Rant, one of the most popular and influential gardening blogs. She lives in Saratoga Springs and Salem, NY.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ONE

Why Don't Americans Garden?

On March 20, 2009, the First Lady of the United States did something unprecedented in post-World War II America. She picked up a spade and broke ground for a vegetable garden at the White House. Clearly, this was more of a cultural statement than a physical challenge she'd be taking on personally. Mrs. Obama's attire for the groundbreaking--what appeared to be a dry-clean-only wool sweater and wool pants tucked into fashiony motorcycle boots--was so inappropriate for shovel-work, it made gardeners everywhere smile. But as a statement, that White House garden is just superb. Somebody has to say it: Growing vegetables is a perfectly sensible part of running a household, even a household as elegant as the Obamas'. This is something that clearly has not occurred to most of our countrymen.

In fact, I almost never go for a walk or for a drive without being struck by how many big, sunny yards I see and how very few vegetables I see in them. This is true in rural Washington County, New York, where I lived for a dozen years and where I now have a small weekend house and a big vegetable garden. It's certainly true in the small, lively city of Saratoga Springs, New York, where I lead my weekday existence.

And it's trebly true in suburban Bergen County in the Garden State of New Jersey, where I grew up. Drive down Franklin Turnpike from Ramsey to Allendale on a sunny day in early May, and you will be assaulted by an insane exuberance of lilacs, ornamental cherries, magnolias, and crabapples in bloom--not to mention the cheerfully clashing colors of their flowers. The suburban yards there are lush; the bushes, trees, and grass all green and healthy; the soil clearly excellent; yet in many years of visiting my family, I have stumbled across only two vegetable gardens.

The first was a small one next to an unkempt old house that suggested both an elderly occupant and economic necessity; the second, also small, is maintained by my sister-in-law Na, who is Thai and a professional cook. Unlike her fellow suburbanites, Na comes from a gardening culture, knows it's no big deal to stick a few of her kids' favorite vegetables into the ground, and knows they taste better than what you can buy even in the fanciest supermarket. For years, she worked for organic grocer Whole Foods, but preferred her own vegetables even to what she could buy at a discount there.

Strangely enough, if you want to see vegetable gardens, you might do better in a big city like Detroit or Washington or Boston, where there are real grow-your-own-food movements in neighborhoods largely ignored by supermarket chains and activists who use community gardens to erase urban blight, as well as lots of hip young people who understand the glamour of working the soil.

The United States Department of Agriculture confirms how little backyard farming really occurs in America. It has records dating back to 1869 that consider the dollar value of homegrown food compared to total expenditures on food eaten at home. The last time the nation shopped the backyard for 20 percent of its food by dollar value was 1943. The basic pattern since has been steady decline, and today, we grow just a little more than 1 percent of the food we eat at home. Of course, 1 percent may be on its way to 2 percent, since seed companies have reported dramatically rising sales in recent years. But this is not yet enough of a revolution to satisfy me.

More about that later. First I want to address the why not question. Why did the backyard garden, once an important part of most households, nearly disappear by the early years of the 21st century?

Ask any non-gardener, and he or she will tell you it's because growing food is too hard--sweaty and time-consuming and tricky--the kind of thing nobody in his or her right mind would do once the supermarket was invented.

Actually, it's arguably just as sweaty, time-consuming, and tricky to navigate crowded roads in a car in order to arrive at some cavernous supermarket and push a cart around its miles of aisles a few times a week. And the supermarket is certainly a less pleasant experience.

I'd argue that the main reason we don't grow food is because our parents and grandparents didn't.

Sure, they patriotically tended their Victory Gardens during World War II, easing pressure on the food supply and allowing the government to feed the troops more cheaply. The USDA estimates that in 1943, 20 million Victory Gardens produced 40 percent of the country's fresh vegetables. My father, who grew up in the most urban way possible in Astoria, Queens--playing stickball in the streets and dragging a mattress out onto a fire escape on sweltering summer nights--vividly remembers working the Victory Garden at the Catholic school he attended as a class assignment.

But when the war was over, the culture actively turned against such humble labors. For people who grew up amidst the privations of the Great Depression, followed by the privations or outright horrors of war, nothing was more seductive than the idea of leaving the old ways behind.

My mother is a prime example. She grew up in Germany on a particularly charmless small farm in a particularly charmless small house--dark, low- ceilinged, and since the stalls are attached to the house, full of nasty flies and a powerful smell of manure. She also grew up at a moment when living on a farm did not mean you wouldn't nearly starve to death, since most of the food her parents produced was earmarked for Hitler's soldiers. My mother still shudders at the memory of nothing to eat but lard on stale bread and the atmosphere of terror as bombers whined overhead and the Gestapo staged unannounced inspections that threatened to have her father dragged away. It was not comparable in misery to what Jewish children were suffering at the same moment, but it was not blithe either.

The war ended when she was 12, and when she got the chance to go away to the city to school the next year, she took off like a rocket and never looked back. In her twenties, she came to New York City, and in her early thirties, moved to New Jersey, where she settled in suburban splendor, with a gold velvet couch, creamy wool wall-to-wall carpeting, and a leather- seated luxury car to convey her from place to place.

Though our first suburban house had a yard of almost 2 acres, including a sunny, flat spot perfect for a vegetable garden, my mother did not garden. I remember her going once, and just once, to pick up a bushel basket of manure at the last surviving dairy farm in our suburbanizing town because she wanted to grow some rhubarb. Though rhubarb is one of the most indestructible of edible plants, it barely lasted a year before she mowed it over. The manure may have finished the endeavor off. I think my mother's whole adult life has been about putting the greatest possible distance between herself and a shovelful of manure.

Even those people who spent World War II on the comparatively comfortable American home front were ready to begin anew when the war ended. They'd endured the Great Depression, when the country's poorest could be seen eating out of garbage cans. They'd had to adjust to life without their young men, who went off to war by the millions. After May of 1942, they'd had to adapt to food rationing, too, so the government had what it needed to supply its soldiers and sailors.

Of course, as Harvey Levenstein points out in his book Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, rationing hardly represented deprivation: Americans were asked to survive on about 2 1/2 £ds of meat per person per week, while the British got just a £d and the Russians almost no meat at all. And of course, thanks to the Victory Gardens, there was a bounty of fresh vegetables. My father tells me that his urban working- class...

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Verlag
Rodale Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1609614461
ISBN 13 
9781609614461
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Rodale
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