regardingjohn

‘Tis the Season

On the same weekend of this NYTimes editorial on backyard gardening, the local expo center is holding Madison’s Garden Expo:

The 2009 Garden Expo will be held February 13, 14 and 15 in the Exhibition Hall at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison. This is the 16th annual Wisconsin Public Television Garden Expo. (Last year’s event attracted 16,400 attendees.)

Visitors may choose to attend more than 100 educational seminars and demonstrations on gardening, lawn, and landscaping topics and enjoy hundreds of different exhibitor booths in the exhibition area. Attend one of the many hands-on workshops and learn new skills while creating an art piece to take home.

Sustain Dane rain barrels with clever RainReserve Diverter.

I went last year to help the local environmental group, Sustain Dane, hawk their very cool Rain Barrel System. Afterwards, I got a chance to wander around and see what counted as “garden” these days (spoiler: very little to do with actual plants).

The Garden expo exhibitors seemed to focus on patios, pavers, artwork, decorative ponds, etc. There were, of course, some seeds and plants interspersed throughout, but most of the Garden Expo was about decoration. 

Growing up, my family’s garden once approached a full acre in size, and we didn’t have a single piece of artwork in it (except the scarecrow, which was fantastic!). Our basement was full of meticulously labeled jars of whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, tomato juice, tomato sauce, pears, apples, apple butter, applesauces, green beans, corn, pickles of all varieties (including an unpopular with the kids experiment with watermelon rinds), beets, peas, carrots, jams and jellies of all sorts (cherry, apple, strawberry, raspberry, elderberry, plum, grape, pear, boysenberry, black raspberry, and combinations thereof) — not to mention the baskets and baskets of root vegetables in the cellar all winter, and the upright and chest freezers full of fruits and vegetables (and chicken, turkey, goose, pork, and beef that we grew).

We also had flowers in the yard around the house.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes hopefully in her NYTimes editorial, that perhaps the crappy economy will bring on a Depression-era  boon in backyard gardening as families turn to their own devices for growing food rather than buying it. I wonder. I haven’t gardened since I left home because my summers have almost always been spent leading trips and working at summers camps. If I had a summer at home, I wonder if I’d remember enough to be able to run a full-sized garden (certainly not a super-sized one as my parents did).

I think that for me, and a significant portion of the population, a simpler option would be needed. Something that lets me start small the first summer, and expand. Namely, a window-box garden, or potted garden — small enough, and contained enough that it feels manageable, but big enough and sure enough that I get rewarded with just enough sweet home-grown tomatoes (perhaps) to make me proud, but not enough to satisfy or overwhelm. Leave me hungering for more, so that next summer I want to expand beyond the window boxes to a small raised bed in the backyard.

This is, in many ways, an area of place-based learning that I’ve been ignoring in my research. Maybe it’s time that I turned an eye on it.