The Poosey Digest: If you’re going to take the pie, the crust comes with it

Greetings from the Ridge.

One of the real joys of my summer is visiting the local farmers’ markets. Few of us walking through the rows of melons, tomatoes, onions, and berries can take the stroll without thinking back to the gardens of our grandmothers. It’s not only a delightful little saunter among fresh produce but a scent-laden journey into our own childhood.

There’s something delightful about purchasing a handful of new potatoes from the fellow who dug them yesterday, and I’ll admit that I usually buy more vegetables and fruit than I actually need simply because the digger, the hoer, the picker and polisher are standing right there in front of me. How can you walk past a lady’s radishes and not buy a few? Radish picking takes bending over and the least I can do is reach into my purse.

Much has been touted lately about starting up a nationwide back-to-the-garden movement. Michelle Obama’s White House garden project drew a great deal of attention although U.S. Presidents as far back as John Adams have been planting gardens on the site. In fact, a White House green house was torn down to build the West Wing. Eleanor Roosevelt built a whopper of a Victory Garden on the White House lawn, and Jimmy Carter installed solar panels to keep the lettuce growing year-round. Laura Bush became "Mrs. Organic," and the Clinton’s fertilized the place so drastically that the chemicals may be endangering Michelle Obama’s kumquats.

And of course the various recent residents of the White House have gone green not so much because they enjoyed the taste of a juicy tomato… word has it they can afford to go to the Farmers’ Market… but to inspire the rest of us.

Hundreds of cities like Detroit and Trenton, New Jersey, have jumped whole hog into the City Gardens movement. Herb and I recently stayed in a St. Louis hotel bordering an inner-city garden and adjoining a sculpture park right across from Union Station. Admittedly, it didn’t take much of a green thumb to grow plants in this monsoon of a summer so the garden was thriving as we strolled through it one July morning.

According to the big dreamers in urban planning, this is just the beginning. They envision a nation blooming with taters and onions from sea to shining sea. And far be it from me to pooh-pooh such a noble and healthy plan, it does cause me to stop and wonder… do these folks know just how much work it takes to plant and maintain a garden?

A dear old friend of mine moved to town recently after sixty-plus years of living on the farm. She told me, "I miss the quiet and the peace of the farm but I’m glad I won’t ever have to mess with a damned garden again." Uh… so much for the idyllic idea of growing your own. She said, "That thing just consumes you, May to September. You can’t go anywhere, you can’t do anything, you can’t have a normal life as long as you’ve got a garden." The woman was not a candidate for the cover of Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

Let’s say we do indeed turn our blighted urban centers into veritable Gardens of Edible Eden. Let’s imagine a world where we thumb our noses at the Monsanto’s of the world and return to natural eating in a chemical-free cornucopia of fresh-grown produce. Just who in the heck is going to work all these gardens?

Does the typical latte-drinking, twitter-happy, sandal-wearing child of nature have the slightest idea what it’s like to dig a row of potatoes, spend an afternoon bending over a row of green beans, or hoe sweet corn until the blisters appear? I’m not slamming the New Age lifestyle. I just wonder if the average advocate of free-range gardening has read the instruction book.

When Grandma put in her garden it was not out of some esoteric need to enhance her life with transcendental vegetation. She was hungry. Her family needed something good and cheap to eat. The present-day giants of the food industry have pretty much done that for us and without all the bending over.

Let’s plant our city gardens, let’s cultivate the back-to-green movement from Seattle to Boston, and let’s encourage our children to eat healthy, but somewhere along the line let’s realize that the vast majority of our produce is picked by people we’ve hired to do it… people who are willing to do it… people whose skin color may not match our current mood of legislation. As Grandma would say, "If you’re going to take the pie, the crust comes with it."

You ever in Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.