Breaking Ground

            As a child, I was my maternal grandmother’s garden helper.  In the large expanse of cultivated earth that stretched from her backyard to my own, four houses away on a quiet neighborhood street, she taught me to identify seedling plants and to pull invasive weeds that threatened to choke them.  She showed me how to carefully harvest ripe fruit and vegetables without damaging the supporting plants.  I learned to step between cucumber vines that snaked across the ground and pluck succulent fruit that hid under leaf cover.  Granny pointed out insect pests and together, we squashed Mexican bean beetles and Colorado potato bugs and destroyed their eggs, bright yellow dots on the underside of plant leaves.  These lessons, valuable information for gardeners and farmers, were lost to me until my husband, Richard, and I planted a large garden of our own in 2008.

            Perhaps we were coping with mid-life crisis when we plowed eight acres of beautiful farm land and planted a variety of fruits and vegetables.  Maybe our concern about ingesting industrialized food led us to avoid chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides in our garden.  For whatever reasons, the farm became our passion, (some friends call it our obsession) and even when we toil in blistering hot or bone-chilling cold weather, we find our spirits are lighter, our aging bodies are physically stronger and our minds are more mentally alert.  We dubbed our project “Heart & Sole Gardens,” a reflection of the joy we find in growing our own food and the necessary hard work that wears the soles of our boots. 

            2014 marks the seventh year we will plant at Heart & Sole and although we plan to grow fewer crops that we have in past seasons, Richard and I still enjoy planning, planting, managing, harvesting and, most of all, eating, the fruits of our labor.  As long as we are physically able to do so, we pledge to grow as much of our food as possible and to enjoy the process.  When invading insects attack, when marauding animals gobble our plants, when diseases attack our crops or when Mother Nature brings too much rain or too much dry weather, we try to remember the farmer’s irrepressible and hopeful mantra:  There’s always next year!