The pioneer archetype
looms large in the West. Strong and largely fictional, this heroic
frontiersman delivered a calf at midnight in the blowing snow,
mended fence all day and still had time to ride home into the
sunset.
Yet while one pioneer tended the herd, you can
bet another was tending the garden, making applesauce, shelling
peas, and raising hens, activities just as gritty and heroic.
Indeed, the garden is every inch the elemental battleground as a
cattle range. You’re out there, exposed to the elements,
growing enough food to survive the winter.
In my
romanticized version of this myth, vertical integration is key.
Building your house is good, but even better if you felled the
trees and peeled the logs. In this spirit, I’ve always made
it a point to grow my garden from seed.
My wintertime
seed-ordering ritual involves getting cozy with a cup of tea and a
stack of catalogs. I read the descriptions of the various plants,
plan my garden and dream of summer. But things get serious when
raising seedlings, because it’s not enough to be pretty good;
even a B+ amounts to a failing grade.
Any number of
factors can cause the little plants to get stressed, which will set
them back days, weeks, months or forever. Too wet, too dry, too
hot, too cold, too bright, too dim — any of these circumstances
can hurt plants. Once they lose their momentum, it’s nearly
impossible to catch up. A plant, a tomato, say, that’s behind
the eight ball when you put it in the ground might be too small to
bear much fruit when summer hits. Maybe you’ll get a few
tomatoes, but not what you need to survive the winter. A
well-developed plant will hit the dirt running.
Clearly,
if you want a fantastic August, you need a perfect March. And if
you don’t have a perfect March, you’re better off
buying starts from someone who did. Last year my seedlings lived
like orphans bouncing around foster homes. They started in the
basement under grow lights, moved in front of a big window when the
days were long enough, and once in a while the trays spent an
afternoon outside for some fresh air. Finally, they went to the
greenhouse, where cold nights, hot days and erratic watering
slammed the starts into survival mode. They survived but they did
not thrive — a condition exacerbated by store-bought potting soil.
But it’s a poor workman who blames his tools. A real pioneer,
of course, or a real farmer, would have made his own potting soil.
Every spring when the farmers’ market opens, I come
face-to-face with plants raised in stable homes by growers who
really know what they’re doing. It’s humiliating, and
it’s instructive.
On paper, it makes questionable
financial sense to buy starts at the market, where one plant might
cost more than a whole packet of seeds. I’ve fallen prey to
this logic for years. I’ve even clung to this failed logic to
the point where I’ve put my sorry plants in the ground
anyway, just about dooming my garden.
So this year
I’m going to restrain my pioneer impulses and buy my starts
from the experts. Instead of wasting time and money what could be a
romantic exercise in futility, I’m going to make my garden
into the best home possible for the starts I bring home from the
market.
In plugging into my local economy this way,
I’m embracing my community, with warm and fuzzy paybacks like
the relationship that can develop between the gardener and the
greenhouse whiz. Imagine knowing that all across town, people have
planted the starts you raised. It’s like they’re
raising your children. “You get updates all summer
long,” says one farmer friend. “They’ll say
things like, ‘That Sungold tomato plant you sold us; the
tomatoes taste like candy!’”
So, while being
a go-it-alone pioneer is a cool concept, being a player in a vital
community is even cooler. And instead of studying seed catalogs,
I’ll be scheming about the drip irrigation system I’m
installing this spring. I want it to be water-wise, easy to manage
and ready to go when I bring home my adopted garden.
Ari LeVaux is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
syndicated food columnist who lives in Missoula,
Montana.
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