Please Don't Learn to Garden
originl here
May 15, 2012
The whole "everyone should learn organic gardening" meme has gotten so out of control that the First Lady of the United States actually vowed to provide food for her family's meals and for formal dinners from her South Lawn organic garden and to highlight the importance of a healthful diet in 2010.
A noble gesture to garner the country's green community vote, for sure, but if the First Lady of the United States actually needs to sow a row of tomato seeds to put healthy food on the table, something is deeply, horribly, terribly wrong with the kitchen staff at the White House. Even if Mrs. Obama did "learn to garden", with apologies to tomato lovers everywhere, I expect she'd end up with a bunch of blossom end rot.
Fortunately, the odds of everyone eating vegetables from their home garden happening - even in jest - are zero, and for good reason: people will hopefully spend their time ordering delivery or going through drive-throughs. The average American is less than 5 minutes away from pizza, hamburgers, Chinese, Indian, Sushi, deli ... do I really need to go on?
Look, I love gardening. I also believe gardening is important ... in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn gardening than I would urge everyone to learn sheep shearing. That'd be ridiculous, right?
The "everyone should learn gardening" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates gardening with essential life skills like eating. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways.
- It assumes that more tomatoes in the world is an inherently desirable thing. In my thirty year career as someone who eats, I have found this ... not to be the case. Have you ever been to a produce stand and not seen rotting tomatoes? We are already wasting so much, I can't get behind wasting more. Go to your local farmers market, buy the overripe tomatoes, and make some pasta sauce.
- It assumes that gardening is the goal. Home gardeners tend to be gardening addicts who think their job is to till their own soil. But it's not. Their job is to put food on the table. Don't plant a seed, go to your local farmers market and buy a tomato. We have way too many gardeners addicted to just one more plant in the ground already.
- It puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to plant some seeds, figure out what you actually want to eat. Do you even want to eat kale? Will that rhubarb make it into a pie or will you let it drop to the ground and rot? Will you stop going out to eat every night? Are you sure?
- It assumes that adding naive, novice, not-even-sure-they-like-this-whole-gardening-thing-and-eating-fresh-fruits-and-vegetable-and-getting-dirty-on-the-weekends-and-having-plants-that-become-dependants-to-the-point-you-feel-like-you-should-be-getting-a-tax-break gardeners to the workforce is a net positive for the world. I guess that's true if you consider that one bad gardener will now be supporting his local garden supply store as well as the local grocery. And for that matter, most people who already call themselves gardeners have yet to eat something they've grown from seed, so please pardon my skepticism of the sentiment that "everyone can garden".
- It implies that there's a thin, easily permeable membrane around the seeds that allows water in and instantly produces a zucchini suitable for grilling. Just look at the pictures on the seed packets of these ripe red tomatoes and oversized pumpkins! Maybe you too can grow a zucchini the size of a baseball bat! While I love that gardening is an egalitarian field where beans and sugar snap peas appear from what was once just a patch of dirt, you still gotta put in your dozens of hours like the rest of us.
I suppose I can support a tiny bit of herb gardening just so you can season up the meals you happen to cook at home, and when the smell of a basil or thyme plant might brighten your day. But I can also recognize sheep shearing problems when I see them without any particular training in the area, like when I need a new shirt. The general populace (and its political leadership) could probably benefit most of all from a basic understanding of where food comes from. Being able to buy safe and flavorful produce is becoming a basic life skill, and we should be worried about fixing that first and most of all, before we start jumping all the way into home gardening.
Please don't advocate learning to garden just for the sake of learning to garden. Or worse, because of the plump tomatoes. Instead, I humbly suggest we spend our time visiting our local farmers markets. They have fruits and vegetables that will keep you coming back for life.
Please Learn to Garden
original hereIt's very surprising to see a post entitled "Please Don't Learn to Garden" from someone who has spent the last two months building a veritable Garden of Eden in the back yard of a house he is only renting.
Jan is arguing that not everybody needs to learn to garden, and in fact the world doesn't need more space taken up by tomato plants that will never produce in time. So he's not that enthusiastic about recent initiatives like Berkeley Edible Gardens that aim to democratize home garden commerce.
And since Jan is me, I think that entitles me to a counter-point.
I think everybody should learn to garden, for one simple reason: knowing how to garden is hugely empowering.
I can't think of many other skills that enable you to create something from scratch that will provide you with fresh produce for a long time as knowing how to plant some simple seeds.
Just last week, I was able to come home with a Sweet 100 tomato plant from the farmers market and have it transplanted in less than an hour. That plant is doing really well right now and has the potential to provide me with hundreds of tomatoes throughout the summer.
Think about it: something I did could produce hundreds of actual ripe tomatoes and have an impact (however tasty) on dozens of salads. That would never be possible if I didn't attempt to learn how to garden.
What's Gardening?
Now you can argue that you don't need to know how to garden to transplant a tomato plant. You probably don't think of picking a ripe tomato as "gardening".
But from where non-gardeners stand, transplanting a tomato plant and planting a tomato seed have about the same degree of complexity.
"Learning to garden" doesn't always mean becoming the next Michele Obama just like "learning to code" doesn't mean becoming the next Linus Torvalds.
It simply means having a basic grasp of where our food comes from instead of blindly buying whatever tasteless tomato happens to be on sale (and maybe eventually being able to grow your own flavorful tomatoes).
The first step is letting people know that learning to garden is not that hard, and that if they put their mind to it they have a high chance of succeeding. I believe this is what home garden initiatives are trying to do, and I think that's a very valid goal indeed.
