Grandmas Inspiration
Go to any new or used book store and find the garden section. It’s easy to locate, it’s the shelf that is sagging under the immense weight of the billion words written about it, none of them inspire anybody to garden.
The problem with experts is that they are forced by the publisher to bring something new to the marketplace in order to get published. To do this, they have to add more detail. When the ordinary person studies the book or books, it seems so complicated, they just lay the book down and go on with life, without gardening. What a shame. Gardening is easy and beautiful.
I got into gardening with no experience and almost no reading. The first time I ever came near a garden was when I was about ten years old and I was mowing my Grandma’s yard. She had one of those nutty gardens, full of stuff I never had put on my dinner plate before. One summer day, after I mowed her yard and went inside to get a drink of water, I asked her why she had a garden when she could just go to the store and buy it.
Grandma answered this way- “For the same reason your mom and dad had you.” I will never forget those words because I have thought of them for forty years now and they always make me smile. She, like me now, grow because we love to make new life. I can also tell you several other reasons like how it saves 90% on my food bill, and because I can guarantee that the food we eat in our house is not genetically modified and is organic and healthy, with no pesticides or herbicides on or in it. And because I believe that rough economic times are here and going to get worse and if you can’t grow your own food, you are going to have limited choices. However, the true reason for gardening is precisely what Grandma said to her ten year old grandson forty years ago— it is because we love to take a simple and tiny seed and place it in a nourished ground and watch it COME ALIVE. Our vegetables then give back to us in the form of health and energy. And as long as we do good with that energy, such as love, the seed completes its mission.
