Growing Organic Vegetables at Home

¶ … Growing Organic Vegetables

I just walked by the entrance to a nearby apartment in my complex and began a conversation with an older woman tending her plants. This woman, Janice, had been living here for years and had created a tremendous 'jungle' of vegetation surrounding her stoop. I politely asked her about a few plants that I failed to recognize and was informed about an assortment of vegetables and herbs she used in her cooking. I thanked her for the information and wished her and her plants a good day. Within a few minutes I received a call on my cell phone, which forced the pleasant echoes of our conversation into the shadows of a quickly disappearing morning.

In the evening, as I was arriving home, my eyes flitted across the courtyard of the apartment complex half unconsciously until they encountered Janice's jungle. This sighting reminded me of our conversation earlier in the day and my long-held intention to create my own little vegetable garden on my stoop. The urge to be an urban farmer has remained rooted in the back of my mind, emerging whenever I drive past a nursery or someone's garden, but rendered mute under the weight of a busy schedule.

The dream of growing my own vegetables represents for me a yearning for a slice of personal time unhurried by the demands of civilized society. Although Janice is retired and has more time to devote to her garden, I feel a part of me needs to be reminded that life is not only about the grind to get ahead, but also about its simplicities, such as the passage of time according to the daily and seasonal cycles of the sun. There is something about buying and assembling the pots, organic soils, organic fertilizers, and heirloom seeds that remind me of my grandparent's preparation of their garden in late fall and early spring. These tasks were scheduled according to the Farmers' Almanac, recent frosts, and the hibernation patterns of earthworms, not by alarm clocks, iPhone calendars, and a society increasingly immune to circadian and seasonal rhythms. Poking my finger into the rich, loamy soil, dropping a few seeds in the hole and covering them, lightly soaking the soil with water, and then waiting for the sprouting seeds to poke through in search of life-giving sunlight, reminds me that life, despite our personal and societal machinations, has its own internal clock.

Being reminded that life has its own speed, largely independent of human control, would not be enough on its own to justify creating an organic vegetable garden. While tending to the plants and watching them mature is a pleasant reminder of the solar cycles, harvesting and consuming the fruits of my labor has another unique reward. The tasks of planting, tending, harvesting, and consuming my organic vegetables remind me that the cycle of life is not an abstract theory entombed in some musty old biology textbook, but an expression of my life as well. This sense of being an integral part of nature is renewed every time my teeth crunch into an unbelievably delicious carrot or tomato, which I watched grow from a seed over a period of months. I can't help but ponder the web of mutually beneficial connections between ourselves and countless other forms of life, which have survived over unknown millennia. The carrot plant benefits from my need for nutrition and I'm rewarded in turn by the burst of flavor and nutrition in every bite. The purchase and consumption of store bought vegetables simply cannot provide the same experience.