Growing Our Own

by Louis Cox

My present interest in home vegetable growing was shaped in early childhood. During World War II, my mom tended a "Victory Garden," and I can remember homegrown fresh vegetables like Swiss chard and juicy red tomatoes being a special part of the household diet. Another early gardening lesson came from my grandparents, with whom my family lived at different times when I was a youngster. Like many others during the Great Depression of the 1930s, they had survived partly by tending a large backyard garden. I can still recall the excitement of being allowed to pick their strawberries, crack their pecans, husk their sweet corn, and collect eggs from their chicken house.

I experimented with a few backyard vegetables when I was a teenager. I was heartbroken as I watched a hurricane snap off a young peach tree that I had lovingly tended. My biggest success was a huge watermelon that started as a volunteer sprout in a flower bed.

While I was in college, gardening and other mundane matters never entered my consciousness. Then came the first Earth Day in 1970, which awakened me to the global ecological crisis. I was convinced that the crisis would be averted only if people returned to a healthy relationship with the natural world. On a subsequent visit to my parents, I was surprised to discover boxes of old Organic Gardening & Farming magazines in a storage cabinet. The publication had been coming to our house for many years, and I hadn't even been aware of it! I spent hours excitedly reading those back issues and couldn't wait to start a garden and get dirt under my own fingernails. I felt I had come "home" in more ways than one.

Unable to fulfill this longing while living in a city apartment, I moved to the countryside to start an organic homestead. I slowly acquired most of the basics of food growing—figuring out what types and varieties did best in that soil and climate, learning not to try to grow more than I could reasonably eat or store for the winter, and learning how to keep bugs, turtles, woodchucks, crows, etc. from taking more than their share. I also learned how much easier it is to garden on a small scale just with hand tools. A book titled How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back taught him that heavy permanent mulches eliminate a lot of weeding and watering. Another book, The French Biointensive Method of Gardening, taught me the value of permanent raised beds, which improve drainage and aeration while allowing more crops to be planted with less labor in a given area than conventional row-gardening.

For the past 12 years Ruah and I have tried to meet a large portion of our food needs this way, but for much of that time our work for Quaker Earthcare Witness, plus family obligations, has required a lot of travel, which has left us with less time than we would like for gardening. We persist in starting a medium-size garden each year, however, partly because it's in our blood (literally) and partly because we want to maintain our gardening skills while keeping our garden space from being reclaimed by native vegetation. Meanwhile the hard-earned fruits of our labor often ripen just in time for our housesitters to enjoy them!

Maybe when we retire there'll be enough time for growing most of our food and everything else that country folk are supposed to do. But with an endangered planet that continues to need our help, who knows when that will be. •