Garden

The word above in the title is either a noun or a verb, take it as you wish. Gandhi said, "To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves." Orson Scott Card said, "Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden." There ought to be a lot of gardeners out there with unemployment reaching more than 10% in some states. Thomas Cooper said, "A garden is never so good as it will be next year."

The first year we grew a garden, just after having our first real yard, we had a bumper crop of huge luscious tomatoes. That was almost forty years ago and since then we have manged to kill hundreds of tomato plants without success in getting even a modest crop. I can say with Thomas Jefferson, "Though an old man, I am but a young gardener." If I thought I could make a living gardening, I would have done so years ago. I don't mind the work, the sweat or the bugs, but I do get discouraged with seeds that don't grow at all.

Poet Wendell Berry said, "One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race." I don't have to rejoin the human race, I never left it.