Why Garden? 
I've started this blog at the urging of friends and fellow gardeners who expressed the need for practical information on how to garden and solve the problems they are encountering. Future posts will share more specific gardening experiences that I hope will be useful to you. But first I'll start where I began: down on the farm.

For me gardening is a basic instinct. I grew up on a farm in southern Saskatchewan where gardening was part of life. It was how we survived. When I moved to the city some friends mocked this by saying, "That’s why we have Safeway". 

That wasn’t my experience. Milk came from our cows, eggs from my grandparents' chickens. Potatoes and carrots came from the ground (or the root cellar). Peas and beans we picked fresh from the bush and ate immediately or froze for the winter. 

Each fall was a race with Jack Frost to see how many tomatoes, pumpkins and cucumbers we could harvest before his eventual triumph.

My chores revolved around food production: hoeing the corn, milking the cows, cleaning the pig sty. 
 
Groceries were those things we couldn’t grow, and they came from the small-town grocer (often on credit until we could sell some wheat or a pig).

Later in life, after years of apartment living, my wife and I moved to the second floor of a house in Vancouver. When the owner offered me part of his back yard, my gardening instincts took over. (You can take the boy out of the farm but not the farm out of the boy). Eventually he turned the whole garden over to me. 

After that, I couldn't stop. To get  more growing space, I joined a community garden. And when we moved, one of the conditions was that we find a place where I could garden. Fortunately our new condo was just a short distance from a huge allotment garden. We eventually bought a house and, of course, one of the conditions was that it have ample space to garden. 

Throughout this odyssey I've added a lot to the basic gardening skills I learned on the farm. And I've thought a lot about what is so very good about gardening. 

Of course, there's the element of triumph over adversity. Each garden has its unique challenges--poor soil, lack of sun, slugs, weeds....Overcoming them is such sweet success.

Then there are the many tangible rewards of gardening. What can compare to the flavour of a cob of corn fresh from the back yard, straight into a pot of boiling water and served piping hot? For you, maybe it's a Sungold tomato right off the vine or a strawberry picked just at the peak of ripeness. By gardening we get the sweetest-tasting, freshest vegetables and we know they aren't doused with chemicals that are doing who-knows-what to us. We get varieties we can't buy in the stores, that are tender, tastier and more nutritious.

But I think the explosion of interest in gardening today reflects more than this. I think it reflects a more basic need, an urge to be in touch with the soil and with nature. To connect to something core and calming. It's difficult to be aggressive after a day of hoeing and birdsong.


Most of us work by day (or night) and take away from it, not what we produce, but a wage, cold cash to pay our bills. That's not the case with gardening. When we garden, we create and directly use--or share--the fruits of our own labour. I believe this process of un-alienated labour allows us to feel more whole. It invites us to express and expand our innate creativity. As we commune with nature, as we create something of value, both beautiful and useful, we become more human. You might say it's both a response and an antidote to today's world.