This morning we made one of our final deliveries to our distributor, Luurtsema Sales. Since we started shipping, we've moved an incredible number of plants. Last year, the greenhouse didn't look this empty until early June.Back in March, the high demand for seeds made us think vegetable plants would sell briskly, but how briskly they sold surprised us. Each time we backed up to the warehouse, we had to navigate a swarm of trucks. There must be a lot of new gardeners out there. I’m glad for this.
We do encourage our CSA members to try their hand at gardening, to grow at least a couple of vegetable plants. Why? One reason is to complement your share. Herbs, for example, are easy to grow, even in pots, and are useful for enlivening your cookery. Also, if you really like a certain vegetable -- tomatoes, for example -- you may find that you don’t receive enough in your share to satisfy you. Try growing some of those too.
But there’s another reason to grow your own. An important part of mindful eating is understanding how our food makes its way to our plates. Tending some vegetable plants teaches us how this happens. Wendell Berry, in his essay “The Pleasure of Eating,” encourages us to “participate in food production to the extent that you can.” In his words,
If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.
If you don’t have a spot in your backyard sunny enough to grow vegetables, we sell a number of varieties that thrive in containers. We also carry some very ornamental vegetable plants that you could slip in your front flower beds, and no one would be the wiser. And if you were planning on buying some of our plants but haven’t yet, don’t worry. We made sure to set aside some of every variety we grow to sell at the market and to our shareholders. We also planted some small successions so that we can have fresh plants to sell later in the season. So there’s plenty to go around, for now. But I wouldn’t delay much longer.
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