Our Garden

Photo by Mary Ecsedy

Gardeners are civilized human beings. Civilization is essentially the result of gardening, which expanded into full-blown agriculture thousands of years ago in the fertile land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in ancient Sumer. The Garden of Eden.

I've been a gardener all my life. One of my earliest memories is transplanting a pack of rich purple pansies into "my" area of the back garden, all together like they'd been in the package, and my mother showing me how to spread them out "so they can breathe." She has a green thumb. I grew up in South St. Louis near Shaw's Garden, and attended their Saturday morning gardener's classes for years. In the early 70's, before the oil embargo made it prohibitively expensive, we went to day camp at Shaw's Arboretum for a couple of weeks every summer. We hiked all over the place learning all about plants and ecology and how to read the environment.

Don's father was literally born in a field on a small farm in Budapest, Georgia, and Don grew up with gardening. His dad and uncles had large vegetable gardens in their backyards in Pittburgh. It's hard to have a garden when you live in apartments, but when we bought our first house in Greenfield, in Pittsburgh just a couple of blocks away from where Don grew up, we were finally able to have a real vegetable garden. Our lot was 20x140 feet, on a slope, but the soil was rich and everything grew like crazy. Now we live in the Ozarks next to the woods, and we're learning how to maintain a garden with so much shade and so much wildlife.

Gardening is a lot of work, but I never get tired of watching the miracle of seeds sprouting and buds opening, and the awesome lessons that Nature has to offer for those who are paying attention.

We also enjoy good food, and nothing tastes better than food you've raised yourself, or raised locally. Modern industrial agriculture is a marvel of productivity, but this has come at the cost of flavor and nutrition, unfortunately. I don't have a solution to that except to support local agricultural producers.