I grew up with a mother who spent most of her free time digging in the dirt. She loved flowers and they responded to her love. Roses grew for her in places no one else could get them to grow. Tomatoes were the only vegetable that we had room for at my childhood home, but they did incredibly well.
Growing up, the only digging in the dirt that I did was to get worms so I could go fishing. I was completely uninterested in growing anything. That certainly continued through my college years. The change and how it came about are something of a mystery even to me. When it happened is easier. The change happened sometime between August 1971 and January 1972 when I started ordering seeds from a catalog.
No one told or forced me to start growing vegetables, but by the summer of 1972, I had a huge garden and plenty of dirt on my hands. Dirt has certainly been on my hands on a regular basis since then. I credit two books for the huge impact that they had on me. The first is Malabar Farm by Louis Bromfield and the second is Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. The two books convinced me to get my hands dirty.
Having a garden goes with having a farm or at least it did back in the seventies and eighties. When you move off a farm, it gets far more difficult to garden. The picture at the top of the post is perhaps our most difficult attempt at gardening. We had to hire a contractor to bring in a backhoe and dig out the rocks before putting in new dirt. You can hardly see the patch of bare ground at the back of the photo. In hindsight we should have known that given our northern location, Halifax, Nova Scotia, sun should have been a critical element in our plans. In our defense, we only lived there a little over two very snowy years before moving south.
Eventually after coming back to the states, we ended up in Roanoke, Virginia. There was enough space for me to start growing tomatoes again. My wife had a great place to grown perennials and there was plenty of room for pansies and other plants. Eventually deer became such a problem that it was hard to grow much of anything. I still remember coming home one night to a deer standing on our front step and nibbling on a Coral Belle.
Still there many years when I enjoyed the great tomato race that I had with friends. The tomato race continued after we moved to the North Carolina. While it might have appeared at first glance that we had little space to garden at our coastal home but we kept working and started composting. Composting was something we had not been able to do since we left the farm. The compost yielded amazing results. Our garden at the coast was a resounding success year after year. We left a huge container of compost for the people who bought the house from us. The report we got is that they also had a great garden.
We have moved to a new place with plenty of room for gardening. it is a blank slate, but we are much older so our efforts will be targeted but we expect to successful. Neither of us mind getting dirt on our hands. It has helped us to stay grounded so to speak.
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