Cultivating the love of gardening
When is the best time to plant an oak tree? 10 years ago. When is the second best time? Right now. The essence of Chinese medicine is often being connected with the earth. Not only are there many scientific benefits to gardening, the outdoors, and grounding or earthing – it’s one of the most convenient ways to eat a healthy diet. Commercial agricultural soil has been depleted by years of overuse without proper replenishment of nutrients has made foods so much less nutritious than they used to be. Buying organic is one way to help to reduce pesticides and chemicals and hopefully to have more nutrient dense and delicious foods. Yet, at home it’s possible to control these factors and so many more! So, what the problem? Why doesn’t everyone who is capable have a beautiful and prolific garden?
The answer is so complex! Firstly the industrial revolution of the 1700’s and 1800’s. Before that people in America and Western Europe were living more cottage lifestyles but as the industrialization spread the cottage surrounded by orchards and herb gardens with families practicing their crafts at a humane pace, started to disappear. Entire families were sent to work in factories, more or less for the rest of time as we know it.
Those trying to get back to a cottage aesthetic has become a ‘thing’ in more recent years and we have seen a revolutionary return to home. More mom’s are staying home and trying to re-claim crafts and cooking than they were in the 80’s and 90’s. Neither do women today want to go back to the 50’s when convenience started to rule, we want to go back to the early days before washing machines and dishwashers among other factors of industry began to set the pace. Human pace is different than machine, although machines do help us have more time in theory for other things. Among humans healthy paces vary drastically as well, between genders there is thought amongst the healing community to be a chasm relative to basic western cultural assumptions or expectations. Women are thought to be the healthiest when flowing with their natural cycles of menstruation as it relates to the moon. Women’s health cycles of menstruation, pregnancy, birth and menopause make slowing down essential at times certain times but it’s too often the habit to bounce right back (after childbirth for example) before we’re ready, or to push through athletics when our wombs are aching for rest. So how do we slow down? It’s easy to be idealistic and who doesn’t want delicious vegetables heaped on their plate (picky eaters cover your ears!)?
Even if you don’t like veggies, you might like flowers, or bees, or herbs for pizza or tea! Long romantic afternoons in the garden sipping tea under a trellis? No? Slugs? This writers kids loved slugs when they were little, unique but endearing. Your writer here too, it not a gardener. A born and raised Alaskan yet as an adult I’ve only tried gardening for a few years here on a small scale. It’s been trying. There’s been bugs and setbacks and disappointments, money wasted and not many more vegetables eaten than if I’d planned and followed through with a harvest from Carrs. To be honest, if the American Cancer Society recommends 7 servings of vegetables per day, then my gardening skills are not going to cover that! This year cultivating a love of gardening as if one was a child is the idea.
Keeping it fun and finding inspiration from the book Roots, Shoots, Buckets, & Boots, by Sharon Lovejoy. All you need for a pizza garden for example is a simple round plot of land, stake, string, fertilizer, soil, and herbs and flowers. It could be as big or small as you want and it’s like ‘hey, it’s not delivery – it’s rooted and already here!’ If you want to get started with gardening and you’re a total novice like me who feel equal amounts excitement and lost in a greenhouse or in the spring about when/how to get started, this article is encouraging you to get started with one fun project, or 2, or 3! The sunflower garden in the above mentioned book or the water barrel garden are also great ideas to whimsy up your summer. Planting everything all at the right time and all of it is A LOT of pressure. Alaska’s temperamental ‘soil’ doesn’t make it any easier.
Gardening can be whatever you want it, it can look like neat rows of a farm or a wild patch of seeming chaos that is actually a jungle of symbiosis! The latter is how native American gardens were set up, to my knowledge. My hope for you is that your garden may be an expression of the ideas and desires that flower and flow from your own hearts passion as it comes to it’s peak during all of your summers.