7 Reasons You Should Be Gardening

From the entertaining and informative web site The Art of Manliness comes this guest post on "7 Reasons to Become a Gentleman Gardener".

With warm weather upon us and summer just around the corner, it’s time to think about gardening. “Gardening?” you say. Yes, gardening. If the mention of it has you thinking of aged ladies in big hats and frilly gloves gently nipping blooms from their roses, then you have the wrong picture. If you aren’t already gardening, there are plenty of reasons to be doing so. It’s time to lay down your gardening misconceptions and pick up a shovel and a hoe.

Manly Horticulturalists in History

Gardening goes way back and has a good deal of manly history. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the planting of crops led to the creation of what would eventually be modern culture. The first crops were grains, as in wheat, barley, and the like. But don’t think that agriculture began just so that everyone could eat bread. On the contrary, modern theories of early agriculture show that the practice started so that the Neolithic nomads could get their homebrew on. That’s right – early agriculture was driven to produce beer. You can’t get any manlier a start than that.
Fast-forward several thousand years and you find that some of the most celebrated gardeners of our time have been men. Perhaps one of the most prolific and adventurous of them was the third president of our country – Thomas Jefferson. During his time, he was known far and wide for his gardening prowess. He would even compete with his friends to see who could harvest the first peas in the spring (manly competition has obviously changed with the invention of football and video games). He kept journal after journal of his trials and errors in the garden and has passed down a legacy that lives still today. The gardens at his home, Monticello, still function much as they did when he was gardener-in-chief. There’s even a Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.
Aside from Jefferson, we find garden pioneers like Luther Burbank, who developed more than 800 varieties of plants throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s and is the father of the Russet Burbank potato. It was his unorthodox and untidy tinkering that led the horticultural industry for decades and ultimately culminated in Congress passing the 1930 Plant Patent Act. Since he had passed away four years earlier, he was posthumously awarded 16 patents. Burbank’s contemporary and competitor was W. Atlee Burpee, who had the largest seed company in the world when he died in 1915. The company distributed over 1 million catalogs annually and took over 10,000 orders per day. The company is still in operation as Burpee Seeds.
Of course, the one horticultural hero celebrated in both song and story is Johnny Appleseed. No, he’s not just a legend of frontier America; he really did exist. Despite living as a pauper, John Chapman (his real name) became a legend during his own lifetime. He traveled westward ahead of the expansion of the growing United States, introducing apples to much of the frontier of Ohio and Illinois. This itinerant farmer wasn’t planting apples so that people could get all their fruits and veggies, however. Back in those days, apples weren’t for eating – they were for cider; as in hard cider and applejack...

Go visit and read the whole post, which is informative and a good way to rev yourself up to get out and get dirty in the yard.

Summertime bobagandistic thoughts about the August Oklahoma Food Coop order
Summertime. . . and the living is HOT!

Bob Waldrop's been an online friend for years; his justpeace.org web site is a treasure trove of good stuff on the social teachings of the Church. But working for the poor, as Bob has done, always brings you back to thinking about food. And so his latest blog is about the Oklahoma Food Coop. His most recent post starts off below:

It’s August in Oklahoma, and as we all have no doubt noticed, it is HOT. It was 91 degrees at 11 PM last night on our outside thermometer. Today Oklahoma City seems to be getting a bit of a break, thanks to that cold front that moved through early this AM. We won’t break 100 today, yee haw. It will “only” be 95 degrees or so....

All of which is a rather round-a-bout way to getting to the point of expressing appreciation for our farmers and producers who don’t have the luxury of staying inside with the AC during this critical season on the farm. Just as they brave the freezing winds and ice storms of the winter, our farmers and ranchers continue to keep faith with their land and their animals and their production during the heat of the summer...

Read the rest of Bob's thoughts on local food, home canning, refrigerator and hot-canned pickles, etc at Bobaganda.