Why Garden?

“Why garden? What’s the point? A person can get everything cheaper and easier from the grocery store.”

Yet there’s a pull to nurture our own plants in the soil that many of us would have a hard time describing. 

It Tastes Better 

If we tried, we’d first start with the common comebacks:

“Aw, store-bought produce can’t compare,” we’d chime in.

And it’s true: There’s not a single store-bought tomato with flavors to rival those fresh from the vine, not even close—let alone our fresh, heirloom gems that we’ve chosen specifically over the years to meet our exact, idiosyncratic flavor requirements—not a one.

This would go for every piece in each of our gardens. The flavors can’t be beat.

But there’s much more to it than that, for sure.

If questioned further at this point though, many of us would simply move on to say, “Well, I enjoy it,” flatly ending the conversation, not wanting our reasons probed deeper. 

Is it Easier? Maybe. Maybe Not.

We wouldn’t likely argue the point, but we’d probably concede ease. It’s certainly easier to walk into a grocery store and grab what’s been done for us. 

But it’s only easier if we solely compare that isolated task. 

If we’re only looking at the walking and grabbing, it’s easier for most gardeners to walk ten paces to their gardens and pluck a ripe tomato from a vine than to drive to the grocery store, park, walk in, grab the fruit, check out, walk out, drive home. 

“But what about all the work you put into getting it to that point?” someone would interject. 

“What about all of the work it took getting your store-bought tomato to that point?” I would answer. 

“And all the gas it took shipping it to you? And all the work you had to do to own a car and buy the gas to get to that store and have the money to buy it?

“And what about a more long-term perspective? Knowing that people with gardens eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, and people who eat more fresh fruits and vegetables are notably healthier, what about all of the societal and personal energy needed to later rectify the accumulated effects of lack of good nutrition? What if that’s taken into account? And what about the same for exercise?”

So is it easier? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know if I’d personally concede the point, and for good reason.

Is it Cheaper? Maybe. Maybe Not.

We probably also wouldn’t, but we could similarly argue that gardening is actually cheaper and have some merit, especially when we consider what we get for our money.

Sure, a person can get things that look like and technically are fruits and vegetables from the grocery store, but they’re really the Potemkin villages of fruits and vegetables, erected to look the part to cursory passersby, but deeper inspection finds they taste more akin to the hydrated cardboard cutouts that are their true kin than any real, homegrown versions of themselves. 

And this says nothing of the actual value of what most of us really grow.

The year we moved in the middle of the growing season and didn’t have fruits and vegetables hanging off of bushes and vines and waiting in the ground whenever we wanted them—and we saw, for example, we’d have to pay $10 a pound for the tastiest organic heirloom peppers we normally harvested by the bushel, let alone the rest needed for a single meal that would have cost at least $100 just for the produce—that’s when I realized an even deeper truth to a statement I’d often made: “We typically drastically underestimate the true value our homegrown produce.”

Because we can’t compare it to the pablum we’re offered at the grocery store. They don’t even carry the unique and perfectly ripe, heirloom, organic gems we’ve sublimely chosen for our own unique tastes. And if you can even find them at a farmers’ market, they’re expensive AF. I mean, support your farmers’ market, but, damn, it’s cheaper to grow them yourself. 

But There’s More to It than Cost and Ease.

But, honestly, there’s much more to it than ease or cost.

Even if we accepted the argument that store-bought produce is cheaper and easier, we wouldn’t care. 

Cost and ease aren’t our motivating factors, as evidenced by the fact that most of us would still garden even if it cost us much in treasure and time.

Because there’s a pull to nurture our own plants in the soil that runs much deeper. 

We’re Built for It

It’s in our bones.

We love the soil. We enjoy working it and its smell and feel in our hands. In the spring, its aroma as it warms back to life is a harbinger of all good things to come that year, just as its redolence after summer rains soothes our souls as our faces light in smiles unbidden. 

And our plants’ growth and the garden’s phases throughout the spring, summer, and fall help us mark the passing waypoints of yet another good year. 

Watching something grow that we have helped nurture gives a satisfaction beyond any words I can summon. Because the truth is: the best of it is beyond description. We can’t summon words because there aren’t any.

Gardening Connects Us To Some of the Best Sides of Our Humanness and Allows Us To Grow Our Values

But at least part of it is the satisfaction that comes from being able to grow our values and how it connects us to some of the best sides of our humanness. And these two run together.

We Grow Our Values

Just like cooking allows us to cook our values into our food—whether it’s slow, organic, local food shared with family and friends or conventionally grown, industrial fast food scarfed down alone in the car, we cook our values into our food —gardening allows us that same expression, and maybe more so. Because our deepest values are inherently baked into the process, when we grow our own food, we grow our values.

And everyone’s values are a little bit different…and that’s ok.

It Tastes Better 

Some grow for taste.

And whether we’re a master chef, a gourmand, or just someone who appreciates a good meal, as I said, the flavors can’t be beat. 

It’s Healthier

Some grow for healthy food.

For some of us, this means not wanting ourselves or our children to be filled with or exposed to a bunch of chemicals. 

Others maybe just notice they feel better after eating homegrown fruits and vegetables.

And many of us assume tastier, homegrown produce means healthier produce which equates to greater health for those who eat them.

And for good reason. 

Several ground-breaking studies, starting with the one published by Donald Davis et. al. at the University of Texas in 2004, have shown that conventionally-grown, store-bought produce has lost significant amounts of its nutritional quality over the last 50-70 years —explaining why, when eating such food, we’re often left feeling distended long before feeling sated. 

And, even though there’s no consistent evidence that organic produce is more nutritious—since it’s grown in such a variety of ways, some of which do little to replenish the deeper soil health that actually leads to increased nutrition and instead just mimic conventional production without the chemicals—we now know there is a vast difference in food quality and nutrition depending on how food is grown, And, imagine that, the healthiest food is grown in the healthiest soil.

And, it also turns out, we can taste it: All of the vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, carotenoids, and other compounds that make fruits and vegetables not only look appetizing and but also taste great are precisely what also make them so nutritious. Whether it’s cancer-fighting antioxidants or just the building blocks of healthy cells, tastier produce is actually also better for us, and the tastier the better. 

So, we’ve been right: The better they taste, the better they are for us. 

Healthy Ecosystems & Planet

Some grow to contribute to the greater health of the world around them.

We hear about algae blooms and dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the over-application of fertilizers and crashes in beneficial insect populations from the over-application of pesticides. We hear about food miles and carbon footprints, and we hope we can do just a little bit better on our own plot of land.

But the pull to garden stems from even more than all of this, even with how cool all of this already is.

Connects Us to Our Family (past and present), Friends, and Neighbors

In sharing the acts and the bounty of gardening, we find deeper connection.

It connects us to our family, past and present. It adds spice, depth, and reciprocity to our friendships. And it bonds us to our neighbors.

As we practice methods passed down by family members or find out we miraculously do things just like some ancestor we never met, learn from and exchange seeds and plants with gardening friends, and exchange produce and talk shop with gardening neighbors, we inevitably gain a sense of concrete connection that, for many of us, is enough by itself. 

Connects Us To Traditions Long Past

But it also bears noting that gardening similarly connects us to all humans throughout time who have done the same thing.

Maybe we, for example, use Buffalo Bird Woman’s methods for planting our corn, beans, and squash specifically because it connects us to those who have cared about gardening well on this earth for millennia before us and the traditions they’ve thankfully long passed down. Maybe we do a version of it without even knowing it just because it’s so amazingly effective and absolutely beautiful, not even aware of how it got passed down.

Either way, following thoughtful, reciprocating traditions like these honors the plants, the soil, the sun, the water, and the people who’ve passed the traditions down for generations and millennia. Whether we’re fully conscious of their origins or not, we’re connected to all of them. And, at least on some level, we sense that we’re part of this lineage and tradition.

The Best Sides of Our Humanness 

Gardening also just feels right in ways we might not even fully realize. 

It’s strange how we, as humans, can toil for decades in pursuits that continue to feel foreign, only to click into others in just a few days as if we’d done them for life. Many of us, for instance, fall into the routines of a wilderness trip our first time within hours as if we’d always done them. And, having tasted such an exalted version of life that, even in its adversity and privations, feels like we were made for, we have a hard time going back to our regular lives and having them make sense in the same way again. It’s why we move mountains to return to their familiar joys, and even their hardships, so we can click back into their routines, as if we’d always done them, and connect once more to the best sides of our humanness.

And, of course, we do! 

Roaming around with our micro-band who all get it, all having freedom within but also working together toward a few common goals of getting to where we’re going safely, setting up some shelter, procuring water and firewood, and preparing some food together before we tell stories around the fire are modern-day versions what humans have done for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. Of course, it feels right!

Gardening is similar. It’s one of those precious joys in life that we click into like a part we were just made to fit. And I think that’s for a reason. 

Self-Sufficiency 

It’s a great feeling when we’ve prepared a meal with our produce. It’s factors better when we’ve made it with only our produce.

I believe we’re hard-wired to like that feeling of self-sufficiency, as if we’d taken a step back to a time when we were able to meet all of our needs with our own hands. There’s an unspoken and often unrecognized uneasiness in any people removed from such things. It’s an uneasiness whose depth only becomes truly apparent when they find inner peace at the hands of their increased self-reliance. 

I think self-sufficiency calls to us because it’s who we are. We are made to want to produce or procure some, if not all, of what meets our daily needs. It’s how we’ve always been as a species. It is simply who we are. The same hands that feel natural in the soil today have felt natural in the soil as farmers for 10,000 years and as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before that. Our essays in our gardens harken back to our heritage as humans who have always provided for our own needs out of the bounty of this prodigal, prodigious earth. And, as such, they connect us to this beautiful and bountiful home of ours—this earth from which we inarguably take our daily breath and bread. 

Connection

We’d have a hard time explaining it, but I think we intuitively understand this connection. How could we not? It’s inherent in growing our own food from the soil. It’s staring at us each time we watch our plants grow, and each time we harvest their gifts, appearing as if from alchemy from sun, water, and soil. We can’t but see our connection to all of life on this planet when we work with the same soil, sun, and water that gives everything we can see breath and being, and, in this connection, we settle into deeply ineffable knowledge and find a new peace—a peace that, because of its shear depth and ineffability, we can only hope to share with others through sharing the acts.

Peace with Life and Death

In gardening, we also inherently find our own connection to all of the cycles of life and death, of which we are naturally a part, and that only feel foreign and scary in their denial. By seeing these cycles in our gardens each year, we slowly come to grips with our place in them, seeing how we’re also part of that same giving and receiving circle of life. Somehow, after enough days of losing our thoughts while staring into the faint light of the evening in our gardens, another deeper peace bubbles up. And, honestly, although we might not be able to ever describe that peace, it comforts us to see our place—in what we’ve come to see as a beautiful cycle in a beautiful place—in a concrete, simple way. 

Giving Back

And some of us eventually find that gardening gives us a way, not just to do a little bit better on our own plot of land, but also to find ways to give back to the rest of existence that has given so much to us, further deepening our connection to all that is. By finding ways to grow for the flourishing of all, we’ve found a depth of peace we thought was impossible to have until our flesh and bones became the soil that gives life to the progeny of all who’ve given life to us.

Bigger Than Ourselves

In short, gardening gives us a concrete avenue to cut out the middle man and intuitively or consciously personally participate in the rest of existence that is so much bigger than ourselves—and, happily, lose our insanity-making focus on only ourselves by feeling properly small, if still precious, as part of it—a place that is our birthright and has been for all time. 

It brings alive parts of ourselves we were simply born to become, parts that, even though those severed from it hadn’t known they’d lost, they could somehow feel the absence of, like the ghost itch of a severed appendage. And finding them lets us know the other lost parts of ourselves that we can sense we’re meant to have in our lives can be found as well, and gives a little better idea about how to find them.

It’s Our Heritage

All of this—the tastes; the joys; our and our children’s health; the health of ecosystems and the planet; growing our values; satisfaction; self-reliance; connectedness to our family, friends, neighbors, and all this is; peace of mind—is why I say gardening is, or at least connects us to, some the best expressions of our humanness. It is part of our horticultural and hunter-gathering heritage that has been passed down in our cultures throughout the world but also seared into the roots of our beings from tens of thousands of years spent in these acts. And it’s one hell of a heritage, one of which we should be proud—and thankful.

So Happy gardening! And may you always stay open to growing.