Something To Talk About

Bonnie Raitt has a song “Something to talk about.” It is about couple whom people think are doing more than appearances show. The singer proposes to give them something to talk about by doing more than they have done.
Truth is that we all need something to talk about besides ourselves. I have enjoyed an interesting life but there is only so many times that I can the story of my wife and I flying into the barrens of Newfoundland in a float plane and almost getting killed by drunken American moose hunters.
Like many other southerners, I plant a garden. It is easier to go to the grocery store or the local produce stand. Yet I still plant even at the age of 75. Granted what you get from the garden is almost always better for you and tastier but it is a lot of work from preparing and planting to harvesting and processing. Based on our experience most people think the only difference in lettuce from the garden is the lack of shrink wrap. The truth is that few people garden today. Many are more familiar with the way food looks under the lights in a grocery store.
One of the reasons I plant a garden besides having some homegrown tomatoes is to connect with other people, some who garden and some who don’t. Last summer we grew so many Cherokee purple tomatoes that I picked up the phone and called some neighbors. We ended up having two couples over for tomatoes. They had never been in our house before I made the offer of homegrown tomatoes. It was a good way to break the ice.
We did have a couple of families that didn’t want tomatoes but once I thought about it, I was okay. There are only a couple of people that I like who don’t like tomatoes. Both are relatives so the odds are not good for non-tomato eaters who are not relatives being very interesting.
Growing a garden also lets you connect on another level with others who are gardeners now or have gardened. Adding the people who have gardened expands the group greatly. Gardening is not political. It is all about sun, rain, soil and pests. There are people who garden that are strictly organic in their practices so you have to careful in some discussions but for the most part, gardening is a relatively safe topic.
Our society continues to fragment at an astonishing pace. Anything like gardening which pulls us together, even slightly, is well worth the effort.
I no longer garden very much. This year we grew one head of broccoli and five heads of lettuce. If things go well, we will harvest one head of cabbage. I have six tomato plants growing along with several onions and what I call my ornamental Swiss Chard. I have no problem eating Swiss Chard, I just hate to ask my wife to go to all the trouble to cook it. Ours is past the salad stage o it needs to be cooked and I know just the recipe but all the leaves have to cut off the stalks with scissors as a first step.
Fifty years ago, we grew almost all our food including the beef in the freezer. In those days we had over sixty calves on the farm each year. I probably planted an average of twenty-five acres of oats every year. The garden was almost an afterthought.
Even last year, I grew enough tomatoes that after I ran out of people who would take them, I ended up selling them at a local produce stand. The thirty dollars I got more than covered all my seeds and plants.
The truth is it does not matter how much you garden as long as you get dirt on your hands and learn what it is like to take a seed from planting to harvest. It can even be flowers. We plant more flowers than garden these days. Once you have overseen that miracle of planting something and seeing it thrive and produce, you have something to talk about with others.
Gardeners are always nice people. If you want to connect with some nice people, connect with the soil first.