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Not knowing where your food comes from
is a primary form of alienation.
- Allen Lacy, in The Inviting
Garden -
A garden... is a finite
place the gardener... has created, working on it with or against
nature, a plot whose intention it is to provide pleasure; possibly
in the form of beauty, possibly in the form of cabbages -- and
possibly, beautiful cabbages.
- Abby Adams, The Gardener's
Gripe Book, 1995 -
The first gathering of salads,
radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby -- how
could anything so beautiful be mine?
- Alice B. Toklas -
For those dependent on their gardens
for fresh food, it was often a case of feast or famine... (One
settler wrote), "Strawberries were now so plentiful that... I made
287 lbs of jam..."
- Bee Dawson, in A History of
Gardening in New Zealand -
Men &
melons are
hard to know.
- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1733
-
see What's
Coming Up #152
Snowy winter, a plentiful harvest.
- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor
Richard's Almanack, 1733 -
see What's
Coming Up #129
Another spring excitement in the
garden is the pea planting...
about the first or second day of
April, as soon as the top of the soil can be worked with a fork,
and long before the plowing.
How we watch those rows for the first
sprouts! How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect
our neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how
silly this sounds to anyone who is not a gardener! Last summer we
got our first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a
handful we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when
somebody called us.
"Hello," we said into the
receiver.
A voice on the other end of the wire,
curiously choked and monchy, cried, "We are eating our first peas!
My mouth's full of 'em now!"
"That's nothing," we answered, "we've
got our first mouthful all swallowed."
- Walter Prichard Eaton, in The
Once and Future Gardener -
see What's
Coming Up #82
Only two things that money can't
buy, and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes.
- Guy Clark, in his song
Homegrown Tomatoes -
see What's
Coming Up #106
Up in the mornin' out in the
garden,
Get you a ripe one don't get a hard one.
Plant `em in the spring, eat `em in the summer:
All winter with out `em's a culinary bummer...
Homegrown tomatoes!
- Guy Clark, in his song
Homegrown Tomatoes -
see What's
Coming Up #135
Take two quinces, and two or three
burre roots and a Potaton, and pare youre Potaton and scrape your
roots, and put them into a quart of wine, and let them boyle till
they bee tender, and put in an ounce of dates, and when they be
boiled tender, drawe them through a strainer, wine and all, and
then put in the yolkes of eight eggs, and the braynes of
three or four cocke-sparrowes, and straine them into the other, and
a little rosewater, and seeth them all with sugar, cinnamon and
ginger, and cloves and mace; and put in a little sweet butter, and
set it upon a chafing-dish of coles between two platters, to let it
boyle till it be something bigge.
- Good Housewife's Jewel
(1596), when potatoes were new to Europe -
see What's
Coming Up #133
(Send) leafy, leafy collard
greens
And please make sure they're washed!
Light up our eyes
Brighten our lives
With ten banana squash.
- The turtle's grocery list, from
song lyrics by William 'Bud' Luckey -
Even where the land was more
receptive, settlers soon learned to take some precautions before
planting their vegetables. Maize and pumpkin seeds were soaked in
water for several days and then blackened with tar before planting
-- the most effective way to deter rats, mice and birds.
- Bee Dawson, in A History of
Gardening in New Zealand -
see
What's Coming Up #142
Stewartia pseudocamellia
The farmers loved her bees, thanks
to
all the pollinating they did, how they
made the watermelons redder and the cucumbers bigger.
- from the novel The Secret
Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd -
The next time you think about falling fruits or nuts as
messy,
consider this conversation between John Macunovich and cousins
visiting from a very poor town in Beylorus (Russia):
"What do you do with the
apples?"
"We rake them up and compost them."
"What?!"
see
What's Coming Up #157
Right: Locust tree seed pods (Gleditsia
triacanthos)
Better eat vegetables and fear no creditors, than eat duck and
hide from them.
- from the Talmud -
I want death to find me planting
my cabbages.
- Michel de Montaigne -
..
.