Gardens are for the birds...

Gardens are for the birds...

By Joe Renna

And the bees... and the butterflies...and for the dinner table, dessert treats, salads, peace of mind, closeness to God, neighborly conversation, bouquets, napping, seasonal change, exercise, creativity, Yankee ingenuity, honey collection, and for the life of the planet and salvation of man.

Did I miss anything? The idea that you do not need to get into the car and go to the supermarket because you are out of fresh basil for the pasta gravy is a wonderful concept. What do you think, four thousand years of tending the earth ought to rate as something man ought to preserve! Well, after two hundred years most Americans now rely on the supermarket. We could boast that the good ole U.S.A. farming methods are the best in the world, giving us plentiful, reasonably priced food. But those mega-farms aren't going to produce a homegrown tomato, fresh herbs, or the satisfaction of having the biggest squash in the neighborhood. For genetically engineered wheat; man you can't beat that factory farm. Let Kelloggs produce all they want - Give me liberty and fresh peach cobbler.

The home gardeners plant lettuce in the spring when the oak leaves are the size of mouse ears. They use pest remedies not bought from Ortho, but made from house stuff that works equally well with out toxic consequences. Gardening is a great book that opens chapter after chapter of life, lessons, tales, parables, and morals. The gardens of Peterstown are oases from the sprawling sterile lawns in suburbia and concrete jungles of the city. The gardens in Peterstown would make people in dear ole Napoli weep, and not from peeling their homegrown onions. Tucked between row houses, along sidewalks, spread over porches, garages and telephone poles are herb gardens, salad gardens, vineyards, tomato vines, zucchini vines, fig trees, peach trees and some stuff that ought not supposed to be able to be grown this far north. Somebody didn't tell the Crepe Myrtle and Hibiscus that this is not Florida.With Yankee ingenuity and green thumbs the plants were duped.

The Peterstown gardens are grown with love and respect. The plant life responds accordingly. The purists use rainwater collected in barrels and distributed so the tomato's lips never touch the chlorine of the city water. With perfect compliment of function and form, old wooden stakes holding squash vines bleach out or are covered with moss in the summer sun and shade. Stains of the dark red grapes paint the concrete patios under the arbors.

Gardens are no longer about necessity. The days are gone when a garden was used as a primary food source or as commerce to trade for new soles from the shoemaker or eggs from the market. Gardens connect people to the earth, to the past and to each other. Gardens should be mandatory therapy for stress reduction. Nothing should be more important than tilling the earth. Take time to sit in a garden. The folks in Peterstown make the time to talk of gardens past, drink coffee, and spin a compost bin. A little heaven on earth with a few drops of oil for the pruning sheers!