The Hedonist's Garden

He even made the cover!Our own John Hershey, board member, former garden leader, and author of Rakish Wit, is featured in the Fall issue of Edible Front Range! Check it out:

In the springtime, garden writers everywhere rhapsodize about that glorious season of rebirth, when the earth comes alive, bursting with new vitality. This is all wonderful, but there has to be a flipside. If spring is the time of rebirth, then autumn must be the season of redeath.

While the spring garden teems with hope and possibility, a feeling of impending doom hangs over the garden in the fall. We count the days until the average first frost date, wondering if each tomato we pick will be the last one to ripen in time. The contrast is intense: Just as the garden reaches its peak lushness and finally begins to yield a bountiful harvest, a crisp new bite in the morning air reminds us of the inexorable passage of time that will suddenly turn it all into compost material.

The ephemeral beauty of the garden is a metaphor for our own lives. And long experience has led me to a profound insight that can help us make sense of these complicated feelings:

Life is like an ear rub.

Find out how life is like an ear rub by reading the full post at Edible Front Range. To read more from John, click here. 

Oh Boy, Oh Broccoli!

A former DUG gardener recalls the fun of community gardening with kids

By John Hershey

For us gardeners, autumn is harvest time. Time to reap the rewards of many hours spent working the soil. Time to enjoy the bountiful supply of fresh food for the family. Time to reflect on the happy thoughts the garden brings to mind this time of year: The change of seasons. The inexorable passage of time. Decay. Death.

But just when you're ready to toss yourself into the compost pile, your spirits soar as you recall the joys of gardening with your children.

Working in the garden with kids is lots of fun. You're outside. You're playing in the dirt. Sharp bladed tools are flying around. From a kid's point of view, it's pure quality time.

And it's educational! Gardening teaches kids important lessons about the "cycle of life". But parents, be ready to answer tough questions about why your child's pumpkin plant died.

Besides the metaphysical stuff, the kids learn practical skills that stay with them their whole lives. Even after they've grown up and moved away, they may still use the horticultural knowledge you gave them to grow their own plants in a garden, window box, or dorm room closet. These valuable skills include fine motor control (handling tiny seeds), sorting (distinguishing good plants from weeds), adjusting water pressure ("jet" isn't the best setting for lettuce plants), and perhaps most importantly, pest control.

If you do not control pests, they can destroy your entire crop. It's important to know which pests are present in your particular ecosystem and take appropriate measures to protect your plants. Can you identify the most harmful pests that attack vegetables in the Denver area? Slugs? Root weevils? European earwigs? No. The primary pests that threaten your garden are, of course, the children themselves.

I'm kidding! Children are a joy to have in the garden. Still, gardening with kids involves walking a fine line. Literally: Between the tomatoes and the spinach. And figuratively: The goal is to introduce the children to the fun of gardening without destroying the garden in the process. I know it's not easy to cultivate their spirit of exploration while constantly yelling "Don't walk there!" But try to inculcate a love for the tranquility of nature with a minimum of screaming. It's the standard parental high-wire act of teaching your kids to do some fun new activity: One false move and you've turned them off of gardening for life.

Many small children are just not yet equipped to care meticulously for fragile vegetable plants. These are people who take the name "squash" literally. The key is to focus on the aspects of gardening that come naturally to young kids, such as touching really dirty things and then immediately putting their fingers into their mouths. Or playing in the mud. Give a toddler a shovel and turn him loose in a large area of dirt, and you're set for a whole day of fun.

But then comes the tedious part. Carefully plant the seeds, one in each little hole, in nice straight rows. Boring! My son has his own highly efficient cultivation method: Dig large hole. Empty contents of seed packet into hole. Cover and keep digging elsewhere. Fun!

Finally, the seeds somehow get planted and the ground is nicely patted all flat and smooth. Then you say to the child, "OK, you see this big patch of dirt, where we've been having a great time all day, digging and rolling around and making mud pies? Well, you must now stop digging and never dig here again. You can't even walk in here anymore! As your toddler's lip begins to quiver, you hasten to explain: Because if we wait very patiently, our seeds will sprout and grow into big plants that, if we take good care of them, will eventually produce . . . vegetables!

Wow, every child's favorite things: waiting patiently, not touching, and vegetables! 

No wonder gardening is such a popular family activity! I'm telling a 4-year-old boy, whose attention span is somewhat shorter than the growing season, that he must immediately cease doing something really fun in order to receive the delayed gratification of growing his own Brussels sprouts.

Yet amazingly, it works! They do like to watch the plants grow. They are able to stop shoveling where you planted, as long as you give them an alternative outlet for their natural digging instinct (a small corner of our garden plot is the designated digging zone). They will eagerly pull up weeds, along with a few innocent bystanders like carrots and beets and radishes (helpful hint: when gardening with kids, plant a few extra seeds to compensate for the approximately 90% mortality rate of your plants). They will have fun watering the garden (and even more fun watering Daddy). They will help you harvest the crop (but forget about gathering just enough vegetables for each day's meal; once a child picks a pepper, it's awfully hard to stop until he's picked a peck, whatever that is, or at least until all the plants are completely denuded).

They might even start to like vegetables. The other night in a restaurant, my son Henry asked for broccoli on his pizza. The stunned waiter, after recovering from the shock of hearing a child order broccoli for the first time in his career, explained that it was unfortunately not available as a topping. Henry happily settled for red and green peppers.

They were a special treat: we don't have any left on the plants at home. 

John Hershey was a DUG gardener for many years before moving to a suburban homestead in Littleton. To read more garden-variety humor, visit his website: www.rakishwit.com. Oh Boy, Oh Broccoli! was originally featured in the Summer 2010 edition of The Underground News. 

Married Community Gardener ISO Friends with Vegetables

From John Hershey of Rakish Wit
Originally published in the Spring 2010 Edition of The Underground News

This will come as a surprise to my friends and former teachers who are familiar with my general attitude toward hard work and delayed gratification, but I'm planting some apple trees in my yard this spring. This is a big step for me. I've never even planted perennials before. I just didn't feel ready for the kind of long-term commitment that asparagus and rhubarb demand, to say nothing of trees that probably won't make any apples until my kids are in high school. The thought of digging in and working hard now for a potential benefit that won't even start for 4 or 5 years -- I didn't think I had it in me. Sounds like college, and I remembered how that worked out.

But having recently moved to a place where I hope to put down some roots, I've decided to put down some roots. And to show you how much I've changed since college, I've been studying diligently about organic fruit growing. From all this reading I have retained one key tip: If you have only one variety of apple tree, it won't produce much fruit. You need cross-pollination among a diverse community of trees for maximum benefit in the orchard.

The same secret to success applies in a community garden. Not so much to the plants, although a wide variety of vegetables makes for a healthy garden ecosystem. But when the different kinds of squashes pollinate each other, a volunteer vine will sprout from your compost pile the next season and produce a zucchumpkin or some other splotchy, inedible hybrid that's as odd but not nearly as much fun as a labradoodle. So the concept applies more to the people. As we've all seen in countless ways, the greatest strength of a community garden is the diversity of the gardeners, each of whom brings a unique set of skills, experiences, backgrounds, personalities, recipes and jokes, producing a garden that is much more fruitful and fun than it would be if we all had more in common.

But digging holes for fruit trees gives you plenty of time and incentive to stop and think, and I've started to wonder how far the analogy goes. I'm playing matchmaker out there, after all, setting up trees I think are compatible with each other. Love is literally in the air in the orchard and the garden, in every grain of pollen floating on the breeze or catching a ride on a honeybee's leg in hopes of hooking up with just the right female flower. We always talk about the friendships that form in a community garden. But in such a sensual place, do more intimate bonds naturally form among the gardeners too?

I don't know the answer personally, because I'm lucky enough not to be on the dating scene anymore. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that love connections are being made in the garden. To find out, I conducted some research on various online dating sites. (If my wife checks my Internet browsing history, I'm going to have some splainin to do.) As I suspected, community gardens are widely recommended as popular date destinations.

For example, a website that gives dating advice for divorced dads (which looks especially bad on my "Favorites" list) encourages older guys reentering the market to eschew the bar scene and head for the neighborhood community garden. And even a site with dating tips for teens lists community gardens as a fun place for young people to hang out, albeit well down the list below bowling, miniature golf, and factory tours.

Another website, yourtango.com, claims community gardening will make you more attractive to other singles (after a shower, presumably). Apparently your image as an environmentally conscious, community-minded altruist appeals to potential partners. "Plus," the site generalizes, "urban farmer dudes are super hot."

Present company excepted, of course. But just as some dimly lit bars are known as meat markets, sunny community gardens are total vegetable markets! What with all the pollen-drenched honeybees diving into flowers and the vines intertwining with each other and the glistening fruits, the charged atmosphere of a garden makes it the perfect place to put humans in the mood for love. You can't help thinking about the birds and the bees when they're flying all around your head.

By recommending it as a good place for a nervous couple to relax and overcome the stress of a first date, these websites recognize the amazing power of a community garden to break down the social and physical barriers that often prevent us from getting to know other people in our community. We each have our own space in the garden, but there are no fences between the plots, only pathways leading from one to another. This makes it easier to form relationships, and not just romantic ones. None of our superficial differences matter, because we immediately have important things to talk about, like why it's so hard to germinate carrot seeds, what to do with all the zucchini, and so on.

So even if you don't find romance in the community garden this season, you are sure to hang out with a group of really fun, interesting and diverse people, and you will improve each other and the garden through cross-pollination. The more experienced growers will happily impart their knowledge of gardening (and life), and the new crop of gardeners will enrich the soil with fresh energy and excitement. And when you leave for the day, they will all probably share some fresh, healthy food with you. Now that's what I call friends with benefits.

To read more garden-variety humor and commentary, visit John's website.