A GENEALOGICAL GARDEN OF JOY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/11/2013)

 

          As I tool down the street in front of our house, I pass some lovely gardens as well as some drearily graveled yards, but the garden with which I would collide if I didn’t hang a left at a junction is a sheer delight of colors and shapes.  The flower that has intrigued me the most is a large white peony, partly because I have failed at getting my peonies to bloom for the last eleven years.  

 

          The garden’s the work of Kristi Baty.  I’ve seen her husband, Ace, a microbiologist who is an associate at W L Gore, doing grunt work around the yard, but the garden is Kristi’s baby.  However, the peony isn’t.  It’s her great, great grandmother’s baby.  The peony is peripatetically genealogical, traveling with familial migrations and generations from Indiana, to Wyoming, to Colorado, and finally to Flagstaff.  It’s a treasured heirloom.

 

          The garden isn’t Kristi’s only baby.  Along with Ace, she’s raising two teenage girls, and with degrees in cultural anthropology and elementary education she owns and operates Summit Gymnastics Academy through which 400 children pass each week on their way to better balance and health. 

 

          But on to her garden.  She calls it a mishmash, but it’s really a profusion of colorful plants, several of which are family heirlooms and all of which are perennials.  Her method sounds haphazard, but the result is not.  Some gardens are plotted as though they were geometric exercises, carefully laid out ahead of time on graph paper and precisely executed; however, others are the products of a vision perceived by the gardener, the details of which are seldom known at first.

 

These gardens unfold as the vision is gradually revealed to the gardener, something like Abraham who “went out not knowing where he was to go (Heb.11:8).”  They require a faith that the vision will ultimately be revealed, perhaps not all at once, but bit by bit.  Faith requires that the visionaries trust themselves enough to live without the certainty of knowledge.  The result is a graceful garden in which all the lines are curved, leading the eye from one space to the next as though the garden were a journey with an intriguing something around the next curve.

 

          Some of the journeys in the garden lead her into her history and heritage.  Unlike so many rootless people, Kristi has kept faith in her garden with her forebearers.  It is difficult to know ourselves if we don’t know from whence and whom we have come.  In short, her garden has a memory, and as she enjoys her garden, she remembers.

 

          If Kristi’s garden is a memory filled with ancestors, it’s also a garden filled with love.  She created a bower under some lilac bushes where their daughters, Ellie and Madigan, could hide and read, a place for children.  Off in the corner is a rock garden filled with cascading plants.  There is a patio with tables and chairs for warm weather parties and dinners, but most of all there are the flowers, tulips, daffodils, iris, gladiola, and dahlia, spread throughout beds scattered here and there in the garden.  Her favorite flowers are delphinium, daisy, phlox, sweet peas, and clematis. 

 

          Save for the concrete driveway and steps in the front and a small pad off the sliding glass doors in the back, there isn’t a straight line in the yard.  The reason is simple.  Straight lines are as dull as dish water and impotent as well.  A skier is all S lines as is the cocked arm of a boxer or quarter back.  Once the skier stands up straight, it’s all over.  When the punch is thrown or the ball passed, the power is spent.  Curved lines are graceful and powerful. 

 

          The 19^th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil writes:  “Every great philosophy has been . . . . the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”  So it is with gardens.  It’s the gardener’s personal confession and memoir.  And with Kristi, it’s the personal confession and memoir of her joie de vivre.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

 

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun.  Smith emails at stpauls@npgcable.com and blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com.

 

      

THE HORSES NEXT DOOR

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/23/2013)

 

         




 Karen Sorensen of Thornagers says that one of her blessings as a gardener is the horses next door.  She’s right.  Having horses next door is a big asset in gardening, especially in Flagstaff where the dirt is so inhospitably rich.  It’s rich in nutrients from all the volcanic debris scattered around the place, but inhospitable because the nutrients are unavailable to the plants.  The problem is that the soil suffers from a want of organic matter, and organic matter not only makes the dirt far more rich and friable but also hosts organisms, especially those strange creatures the botanists call “mycorrhizae.”  Mycorrhiza in the singular, it’s botanically mangled Greek with Latin endings meaning root fungus.

 

          Mycorrhizae are middlemen, transferring the soils’ nutrients to the plant’s roots, and without them there is no transference.  The technical definition is “a symbiotic association of a fungus and the roots of a plant,” which means they’re not really an object, like a wrench, but a relationship, a dynamic.  Unseen with the naked eye, under the microscope they’re weird looking, like that diaphanous fluff used at Halloween.  Whatever they are, they’re essential which is where the horses next door come in.  Mycorrhizae flourish in compost made of hay.

          In Karen Sorensen’s composting paradise she can use the spoiled hay, bedding, and manure and mix it with the coffee grounds and green kitchen waste for a devils’ brew of compost, and she has lots of coffee grounds and kitchen waste when she caters events.  The nitrogen in the grounds, waste, and horse urine break down the carbon in the spoiled hay and bedding, releasing all manner of botanical goodies for the garden, including mycorrhizae.

 

          As anyone knows who has eaten the delightful cuisine served by the staff at Thornagers, the main dining room is a splendid baronial affair with a massive fire place, but our concern is what might be called “the outback,” for want of a better term.  It’s a sunny clearing in the forest behind the dining room.  The pleasant and enjoyable surroundings of the baronial dining room and the “outback” are so lovely that they draw denizens all the way from urban Phoenix and points beyond for weddings, receptions, and “every fancy ball.”

 

          However, our concern is with a green house, a large hoop house, and several raised beds in the outback.  Because of the massive volume of vegetables she uses at her events, she cannot grow all of the vegetables she needs, but she knows where they come from.  So, she focuses on herbs, flowers, and some vegetables hard to find, and, as any foodie knows, herbs are the difference between “plain eats” and fine cuisine.  Something like mycorrhizae, herbs makes things happen.

 

          The greenhouse and hoop house are set over to the side of the outback.  However, the raised beds, bounded by logs, are scattered throughout the clearing where guests, strolling amongst the tents, sipping champagne and nibbling on canapés and crudités, can savor the beauty and aroma of the flowers and herbs.

 

In an age of substitutes, modifications, and fillers, authenticity is one of the rewarding experiences in eating the cuisine at the Kilted Cat.  The herbs and flowers have the finest of composted beds, thanks in part to the horses next door.  There is a world of difference between sweet basil freshly picked the morning of its use and a limp leaf which has been hanging around for days in a store after having been processed and shipped from afar.

 

          One of the consistent themes of modern society is replacement and substitution with the result that we become further and further removed from the natural process.  Industrially produced tomatoes whose only distinction is an astringent taste are not the same fruit as home-grown tomatoes, such as those grown in the Karen’s green house.  Also, there are Karen’s flowers in baskets, planters, and pots.  Food is as much a matter of the eye as it is the tongue.  Karen says:  “Good food starts with good, raw ingredients.”  One sure fire way to get “good, raw ingredients” is to grow them or know where the come from.   

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

 

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared 9/14/2013.  Smith emails at stpauls@npgcable.com and blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com.

 

MY PLUMBER'S WIFE'S GARDEN

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/13/2013)

 

          I met my plumber’s wife, Lanie Criner, about ten years ago when I called her husband, Dennis, to repair a leaking pipe.  She accompanied him, carrying several buckets of plumber’s tools, as he wended his way through our garage.  Dennis is a big guy with blue eyes that look straight at you, letting you know that what you see is what you get.  Lanie is petite, but not delicate, strong, a woman full of life and love.  As Dennis wrestled with the leaking pipe, she handed him tools as he asked for them, something like a surgical nurse handing instruments to a surgeon.

 

          After Dennis repaired the pipe, he introduced Lanie as his wife and began telling us of the history of their relationship.  While a bachelor, he had regularly eaten at her restaurant, My Thai Kitchen, and had enjoyed long conversations at the restaurant with her husband, Walt.  After her husband died, Dennis began working as a part time waiter in the evenings.  Subsequently, they married, and now work together as a team in their plumbing business, Good Neighbor Plumbing Company.

 

          After several visits to fix leaking pipes, Dennis told us about Lanie’s gardens, showing us several photographs.  Later, I visited them and her gardens.  Dennis proudly showed me a two page note left anonymously at their door.  The first page was drawings of flowers and a greeting, “Dear Garden Lady.”  The second page read, “Whenever I walk past you house, your garden is very pretty, and it makes me smile.  I just wanted you to know that it is a lovely garden.  Have a good day.”

 

          And a lovely garden it is.  Their house sits high above the street on a plateau so that the front garden is a series of tiers, rising from the street to the plateau.  The soil is rich.  The plantings are random, not chaotic, but random.  Many gardeners follow the French model with geometrical gardens, following the rationalism of René Descartes, the 17^th century French mathematician and philosopher.

 

Lanie’s front garden isn’t Cartesian with precise patterns, but rather beckoning, resembling the patterns of nature.  The effect is that of an organic union, much like a meadow of flowers.  When Lanie finds a flower she particularly likes, she finds a place for it.  One can see why a passerby left the note.  Her front garden would cause a walker to pause, take in the beauty, and then sigh, feeling better for having feasted on the sights, textures, and aromas of her garden.

 

          All of this brings us to rationalism and gardening.  Botanists are rationalists and orderly, and they need to be.  Gardeners are romantics and sometimes a little off-hand because life and gardens aren’t tidy.

 

          Dennis’ work in the garden is to build the block walls for the terraces and raised beds which he seems to be delighted to do.  A sign of a good marriage is where the husband and wife are happy fostering their partner’s delights.

 

          The plateau on which the house sits is host to a series of isolated beds.  Two of the beds are dahlias which Lanie triumphantly announced stay the winter in their beds without being dug up in the fall, stored during the winter, and replanted in the spring.  This is an accomplishment worth noting.  The dahlias are lush, bold, and bountiful which is proof of the pudding.

 

          There are some apple and peach trees which produce fruit about every ten years which is SOP for Flagstaff’s errant spring times.  Gardeners who plant stone fruit trees in Flagstaff are both stubborn and hopeful.

 

          And then there is a vegetable garden where everything is rational with straight rows, bursting with good things to eat.  One test of a garden is that it is refreshing to the eye and rewarding to the palate.

 

          Lanie comes by her gardening honestly.  Raised on a farm near Cebu City in the Philippine Islands, she learned gardening from her grandmother who raised 12 children and lived to be 110.  Preferring to run rather than walk, Lanie possesses the strength of ten and as with people raised close to the soil, her hand is magical in the garden.    

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun.  Smith emails at stpauls@npgcable.com and blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com.

CHEATING ON THE EYE CHART

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (8/6/2013)

         

Dr. Thomas Johnson, meine Űberfraus optometrist, discovered her trying to memorize the eye chart before her eye examination.  “Trying to cheat on the eye examination?” he asked.  “Oh, how embarrassing,” she replied, “it’s just that I’ve always felt that being near-sighted was a moral failure.  It means that there’s something wrong with you, like you can’t manage yourself.  Besides, I always get the ‘O’ and ‘D’ confused.”

 

          Gretchen should have trouble with the eye chart.  She’s had six major surgeries on her eyes in the last 15 months, but, never mind, she’s being tested, and whatever the test might be, mathematics in school, seminars in college, or eyes in Flagstaff, she wants an “A.”  She came from a family that didn’t suffer second best gladly.  As with people whose eye sight has been threatened or even taken away from them, she values eye sight.

 

One of the uses of eye sight is the appreciation of beauty.  We can appreciate beauty with the ears and the rest of the senses, as in smelling a rose or savoring a tomato fresh off the vine, but eye sight is especially dear.  In Flagstaff, our gift is living amidst beauty.

 

Albert Camus, the French Nobel Laureate, wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that the inhabitants of Oran couldn’t abide the beauty amidst which they lived so they built an ugly city to shield them from the beauty.  So what’s it with the ugly gardens in Flagstaff, the ill-kept ones and the eye sores enshrouded with sheets of gravel, the ones with the textures of death?  Why would anyone enveloped in such natural beauty as our forests and mountains cover the yards with crushed rock, giving their yards the appearance of the barren perimeter, the kill zone, surrounding a military disciplinary barracks?  Perhaps they don’t like beauty, feeling comfortable only with the banal which demands nothing of them because beauty demands attention.

 

A long time ago, my brother asked me to take an Italian physicist visiting Caltech with me on a fishing trip I’d planned in the Eastern Sierra.  As we approached a roadside park just below Mount Whitney, he tugged at my sleeve and said, “We must stop here to pay homage.”

   

The frequent excuses for the banality of desolate yards are saving water, too much work, and too much money.

         

Native grasses and drought tolerant plants need a little more water than gravel, but they look a lot better.  They cool down the yard rather than heating it up.  Sheep fescue and Arizona fescue are quite beautiful.  Wild flower seeds scattered amidst the grasses, such as black-eyes Susans, add vibrant color to a yard.  It’s all so damned easy and inexpensive.

 

Beauty is food for the soul, and if we don’t feed our souls, we wither away inside.  The place to begin with beauty is the natural world, specifically the world around our houses.  This is not to diminish artificial beauty, the beauty in music, art, and literature.  I relish them all.  Indeed, I used to write a newspaper column on art.  Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.  All of the artistic achievements of the human spirit are but footnotes to the beauty in God’s creation.

 

One of my correspondents, Dr. Kenneth Cole, a Research Professor of Earth Science and Environmental Sustainability at NAU, wrote: “gardening is a present day piece of art” which will give everyone “something better” than the everyday.

 

I’ve often wondered why some people choose to live amidst desolation when beauty is so easily available.  I think it’s that beauty demands homage.  The barren can be ignored as people pursue the humdrum.  Just as a belief in God demands worship so beauty demands homage.  These aren’t casual affairs of passing interest, such as billboards.  We have to pay attention, allow ourselves to absorb beauty and its meaning, indeed, to become enveloped in the beauty.  It’s as essential to the soul as eating is to the body.

 

The demands of a garden aren’t physical, but spiritual, and there’s the rub.  They demand our attention. 

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared 8/10/2013.  Smith blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com and emails at stpauls@npgcable.com. 

 

  

           

GARDENING AS AN ACT OF HOPE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/19/13)

          The late Branch Rickey, the baseball manager who hired Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier in professional baseball, managed the Brooklyn Dodgers and then the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1942 to 1950.  He once said, “My father was 86 when he died.  As an old man he was still planting peach and apple trees on our farm near Portsmouth, Ohio.  When I asked who would take in the fruit he said, 'That's not important. I just want to live every day as if I were going to live forever.'”  Hans Vaihinger, the early 20^th century German philosopher, put it succinctly, we live “als ob”, as if.

          I often think of Branch Rickey and his father.  At 86, I’m digging holes and planting several lilac bushes along one side of our property.  I may not live long enough to see them grow tall enough to shield our privacy, but I assume I will.  It’s called hope.  Branch Rickey’s father understood that the genius of gardening is hope.  There is always a tomorrow every time a gardener plants a seed, a bush, or a tree, and it’s the loss of tomorrow where many people, at whatever age, go astray.  They’re spiraling in yesterday’s squirrel cage.  Going nowhere or even backwards, they live without anticipation, a life of boring “same olds.”

          On contrast, some social scientists, called “futurists,” think that they know the future.  The three witches in Macbeth were far more reliable.  Since the only thing we know is the past, the “futurists” talk about nothing at all, a fact that doesn’t seem to dissuade them, resulting in a particularly boring kind of science fiction, rivaling economics.  We all stand “upon this bank and shoal of time,” as Macbeth said, trying to see beyond the horizon into the future’s unknown.

Hope isn’t knowledge, but rather anticipation.  In contrast, that dreadful spiraling experience called depression amongst other things is living without hope or anticipation.  It afflicts people of all ages and isn’t solely an affliction of the aged.  One of the reasons that gardening is so beneficial to the human experience is that it is based on hope, an anticipation of a tomorrow. 

Just a short drive around town proves the point.  A gaggle of dismal young people gathered on a street corner or in a city park smoking cigarettes and pot, drinking rot gut, and talking about nothing in particular, all reassuring themselves that life is barely worth living.  I see them on my way to the main library where I tutor with The Literacy Center three times a week.

Then there is some old fart up to his ankles in dirt and muck having the time of his life caring for several rows of corn or carefully tending his roses.  He has fewer years ahead of him, but he’s joyful because he has hope.  Understanding the contrast is a no-brainer.  It has to do with planting a seed.  The gardener always expects to eat the corn or smell the roses.

Gardening isn’t a rational, scientific endeavor, as are botany and horticulture.  They like facts and figures, charts and graphs, what will work and what won’t, and, especially, hierarchical classifications, all in faux Latin and Greek.  Useful, they keep gardeners from wasting time and money trying things that won’t work.  However, they’re observers and commentators on gardening, statisticians, not lovers.

Intimately involved, gardeners feel their gardens are extensions of themselves.  They feel and touch their plants, even caressing them and speaking to them.  It’s not an objective experience but an intimate one.  They relish the feeling of soil drifting through their fingers, as they plant a seed early in the spring or dig holes, full of hope that they will flower or bear fruit.  It’s an existential and spiritual experience rather than a rational scientific one because it’s a hope grounded in faith.  Faith isn’t knowledge but an assumption that breeds anticipation.  It, also, begets joy.

Martin Luther, the great theologian of the 16^th century who set faith free from authoritarian repression, wrote:  “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

 

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun.  Smith emails at stpauls@npgcable.com and blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com.

         

                                           

THE BEST COMPOST PILE IN FLAGSTAFF

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/10/2013)

 

          “I bet we have one of the best compost piles in Flagstaff.”  The words were those of Nancy Branham of The Cottage Place Branham’s.  “We take all of the kitchen scraps from the restaurant for our compost pile.”  Frank and Nancy Branham are conservationists.  They collect rain water in barrels, some 550 gallons, to water their garden, harvest electricity from solar panels, and enrich their soil with their compost.  As with any great chef, Frank believes in living close to the land. 

 

          Years ago while an urban friend of mine was visiting me, I showed him around my garden and plucked a bright ripe red strawberry for him.  He replied, “Oh, no, thank you; I eat only processed food.” He wouldn’t have done well with Frank’s fresh salads and vegetables.  Frank even said that he didn’t use any animal manure in his compost.

 

          Nancy began their garden by wresting from a mute refuse of rocks and decomposed granite and sandstone a habitat fit for flowers and vegetables.  The dirt was churlish and inhospitable.  She started with a shovel.  Soon Frank added his two cents, buying Nancy a pick axe.  Then Frank became more involved and 14 yards of imported soil were added.  Nancy’s no slouch, a realtor, a professional woman who wields a pick axe and brags about her compost pile, a woman of savvy down-to-earth charm.    

 

      A large rain barrel stands, as an ecological sentinel, at the top of the steps leading from the street to their front door.  Once over the threshold, a row of windows beckons the eye outside where their garden begins with a view from a deck.  The view goes forever, skimming over tree tops with no hints of artificial construction to the furthest reaches of human imagination, to the mountains and beyond.

 

Their garden is a visionary gardener’s garden, not a landscaper’s garden, that is, it has a haphazard look until you get the genius of it.  It wasn’t designed for the eye, but rather for the tongue.  Built on a descending slope, it is a group of 12 raised beds and six hoop houses.  The first raised bed was built by Nancy out of imported soil, compost, and concrete blocks.  A large solar panel helps shade a bed of herbs and nasturtiums.  And then the other raised beds followed, filled with herbs, vegetables, edible flowers, and squash for squash blossoms, placed where ever the flow of the land allowed.  Squash blossoms are one of the seasonal delicacies at the restaurant.

 

          Six hoop houses jammed with heirloom tomato plants dot the slope, and even early in the season the tomato plants were loaded with tomatoes.  Frank has been known to uses walls of water inside the hoop houses.  As with any vegetable garden in Flagstaff, tomatoes are the pièce de résistance of the garden, and they are not just any old tomatoes, but heirlooms that take about 80 days to mature.

 

          Frank uses his tomatoes in the restaurant in three ways.  Some he roasts.  Those beyond perfectly ripe he turns into sauce and paste.  However, the most beguiling use is the Inslata Caprese, named after the Isle of Capri.  It’s a salad in which layers of sliced buffalo mozzarella cheese and tomatoes are spread across a plate and then strewn with basil leaves.  This savory mélange is then drizzled with olive oil and reduced Balsamic vinegar.  Of our five tastes of salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and savory, amongst vegetables, tomatoes are the most savory.

 

All of the vegetables either come from the Branham’s garden or from local farmers save for the Balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  The buffalo mozzarella is produced in-house. 

 

          It’s a question of whether their garden is an extension of the restaurant or the restaurant is an extension of the garden.  What’s not in question is, thanks to Nancy, that Frank is a first-rate gardener as well as a celebrated chef without a surgeon’s ego.  Gardeners tend to be pleasant, engaging people, always wanting to share.  With the Branham’s, it’s the delight that both Nancy and Frank share in their garden and by extension to their restaurant.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

 

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona Daily Sun in which this article appeared 7/13/2013.  Smith emails at stpauls@npgcable.com and blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com

         

   

 

SPITTING CHERRY PITS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/23/2013)

 

 

          Her cherry pies were delicious; however, she baked them with pits.  This meant that they could only felicitously be eaten in her backyard, allowing the diner to spit the pits as projectiles onto the back lawn.  Small boys were particularly fond of her cherry pies.  She said that she didn’t want to take the trouble to pit the fresh cherries from her backyard cherry tree.  Besides, she added, “The pits add to the flavor of the pie.”  Her lawn was a nursery for cherry tree seedlings.

 

          I’ve forgotten her name by now.  It was about sixty years ago when I ate her cherry pies.  She was a bit daft.  When I asked her about the highlights of her trip to Europe, she replied that it was “having tea with the Pope’s wife.”  She went on to say, “She was such a delightful woman.”  A widow when I knew her, she had her late husband’s dress coat of tails cut to fit her which she regularly wore in town when shopping.

 

          She was a dowager in the small town on the Ohio River where I was a pastor.  Small towns seem to tolerate odd personalities far better than large cities.  There is more room psychologically as well as spatially.  The only places odder are university faculties, and they’re tightly compacted.  As a consequence, my second parish was filled with unique people, but that isn’t the point.  My recollections of her delicious cherry pies with pits set me to thinking about seed saving.

 

          Years ago, when I first heard of seed saving, the first word that came to my mind was “quaint” and then “luddite,” a kind of primitive return to simpler times.  So many of the seed savers I knew were horticultural fundamentalists, anti-modernist in their tendencies, fervently chanting, “Gimme that old time religion.  It’s good enough for me.”  I thought, “Why save seeds when it’s so convenient to buy them?”  Besides, thumbing through seed catalogues is lots of fun.

 

          Now, Fundamentalists are basically reactionary, reacting to the emptiness of a fast track society, wanting to save the heirloom beliefs of the past.  The trouble is that they save the chaff of the past mistakenly thinking that they’ve kept the wheat.

 

An industrial, commercial, and electronically digitalized society reduces and eliminates differences and idiosyncrasies.  A reductionist society doesn’t tolerate either the odd and the daft or the seeds of a wide variety of plants.  It cultivates only those types of seeds that easily produce the most abundant crops and are, thus, the most profitable commercially. 

 

In the Great Irish Potato Famine in the middle of the 19^th century over a million people died relying on one type of potato.  When the potato blight, originating in the Toluca Valley in central Mexico, infected the potatoes in Ireland almost all the potato crops failed.  Since potatoes were the mainstay of the Irish diet, especially amongst the poor, there was mass starvation and, hence, the Irish migration to America.  Ireland suffered about a 25% loss of population.

 

Commercial and industrial agriculture is setting us up for the same catastrophe, reducing the varieties of food we eat to those that are the most commercially profitable, laying our food supply open to a new blight.  If there are many varieties, then if one variety collapses because of blight, there are other varieties free of disease.  In corporate sociopathy, greed prevails over safety and well-being.

 

          Many times throughout my life, I have come to believe that which I originally disparaged, certainly politically and theologically, and now horticulturally.  As I learned in college, I don’t have to be a Fundamentalist to be a Christian.  Unless a person is a politician, it’s all right to change one’s mind.  As a matter of fact, it’s often regarded as a sign of intelligence.

 

          Seed saving is a simple, down-home way of preserving our food supply.  If the big boys won’t do it, then the backyard gardeners will have to do it.  Three sources on seed saving are:   http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/vegetable/seed.html, http://www.library.pima.gov/seed-library/, and Jeff Schalau, the Yavapai County Extension Director.  To find him: type “Jeff Schalau Saving Seeds” on your search engine.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013

Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit GARDENING ETCETERA for the Arizona Daily Sun where this article was published 6/29/2013.  Smith emails at stpauls@npgcable.com and blogs at http://highcountrygardener.blogspot.com.