I have lived my life so far surrounded by gardeners and growers. My father had a 90’x90’ plot in the back of our home where he grew vegetables. We consumed what we could every summer. My mother canned and later froze so we could enjoy some vegetables year-round and we gave away the surplus. Zuccini! It was amazing how much zucchini three hills could produce. In August, neighbors would close their blinds and not answer their door when my father repeatedly sent me to gift surplus zucchini.

My sister married into the Wilson Farms family. Wilson Farms was started in 1884 by two brothers and a brother-in-law, recent immigrants from Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in what is today, Northern Ireland. Alan Wilson, my late brother-in-law, was the third generation. Alan was a man of few words, but he and my father would have long conversations about the latest hybrid cultivars of tomatoes, corn, and beans.

My wife, Billie, used to describe herself as having a “black thumb,” a self-deprecating comment that came from trying to keep gift orchids alive in her house, and a poor showing in her first outdoor flower garden at her Northside Pittsburgh townhouse. “I bought one of those ‘Meadow-in-a-can’ tubes and sprinkled it around the yard.” I think she was relieved when we moved close to Central Park in New York City and she could just enjoy the fruits of the labor of other gardeners.

Then we bought a house with multiple flower gardens, flowering trees and shrubs. After a few panic attacks, she dove in and exercised her core strength  ̶  research. Eight years later when we sold the house she left the new owner beautifully maintained and expanded gardens and multiple gardening journals. We moved to a condo complex with a landscaping service, so she’d have more free time, but today she’s outside transplanting azaleas, and planting perennial asters and putting mums in multiple planters.

“Do you think they look better purple/purple, yellow/yellow or purple/yellow repeated?”

“I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about the purple/purple, yellow/yellow,” said I looking at the as yet unbosoming mum plants.

“Yeah, but they’re different sizes. I think I’ll stick with one of each per planter box.”

“Sounds right.”

I am responsible for plants inside the house. I’m not a gardener. I’m the one who might be described as having a “black thumb,” especially if you look at the neighbor-gifted jade plant that I’ve killed and replaced now three times. I have kept sansevieria, called two snake plants, or “mother-in-law’s tongue” , and a very large Areca palm, alive for a while. “Alan, why do you have a hotel lobby plant in the living room?”

At the house of endless gardens, I tried to do a woodland garden area at the back of the property. I put in a stone path, and spread Sulphur around to change the PH from 7 to 5 so I could grow moss. This was something my children and their friends in the Pacific Northwest laughed uproariously about. “You are trying to grow moss?! Why don’t you just move here?”

I also planted about $500 worth of special “woodland plants,” Lady Slippers, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Woodruff, woodbine, Hellebore, White Snake Root, Solomon’s Seal, etc. Our fat ground hogs were very appreciative.

So, while I appreciate the nourishment of the soul of my wife’s flower garden, and the tongue and belly nourishment of home-grown produce, I am resigned to never a gardener be.

I do think about how we grow things and the implications of our choices a lot.

Having a vegetable garden, a “victory garden,” was not unusual for the generation who survived The Great Depression and World War II. My father had chicken coops in our suburban backyard. A neighbor raised goats.

When we moved to Lexington, Wilson Farms was one of maybe twenty local “truck farms.” Like most cities in the United States, Boston had “green rings,: farmland surrounding the city that provided local produce. There were no strawberries in January; you ate what grew in the local season.

Now our food comes from Florida, California, Mexico, Peru, and all over the world, on planes, and trucks, which mess up our air. Progress?

My father used to complain about how the squirrels would strip an ear of corn off the stalk, take one bite and move onto the next stalk in the row. Corn produced one ear per stalk then. Some current cultivars produce two to three. Now we have “mass agriculture.” Farmers have settled on one “high yield” cultivar, and plant miles of it. If you drive through the Plain States in the summer you’ll drive through hours of corn fields.

In the fall, grocery stores and roadside stands sell decoration called “Indian Corn,” two or three ears of colorful corn dried and tied together to hang on your front door. “You can’t eat it, not even for popcorn,” one vendor told me. This decoration is composed of two or three different cultivars grown by Native Americans. The black, red, orange, and brown kernels weren’t grown for corn-on-the-cob, but were ground for maize flour, and were a lot more nutritious than the glucose-heavy sugar-and-gold cobs we drown in butter today.

In the short growing seasons in New England local indigenous people would plant their corn first in the center of a mound often planted with a fish. In the same mound they would then plant beans which would climb the stalk, making it difficult for wildlife to rob the harvest. Then at the base of the mound they’d plant squash, which held the moisture in the soil. These were complementary crops, each taking different nutrients from the soil and putting different things back in. There is probably no way to feed a population our size planting that way, but it makes you think.

Growing plants requires thought. Where does the sun hit at what time of the day? How much water is available and where does it come from. How do you hold water and other nutrients in the soil? When should you plant and when should your field lie fallow to recover? When should you harvest?

This is to say nothing of the competition, bugs, and rodents, fungi, and bacteria. The weather! How can you plant when your field is flooded? Even for rice, there is such a thing as too much water.

“They say it never rains in Southern California,” sang Albert Hammond in 1972.  Wait, what? That can’t be a good thing, can it? Isn’t that where our food comes from?

We talk all the time about growing our businesses, growing our people, growing our children. I wonder if we truly understand the implications of that analogy.

What soil? What sun? What water and other nutrients? What preparation against pests and natural disasters? How to avoid having a “black thumb?”

We need more gardeners.