I was sweating like a road lizard Sunday afternoon after I harvested our purple Magic Molly finglering potatoes.
There were, oh, maybe 20 pounds of the little spuds stretched out in the shade on some cardboard, waiting to dry enough so that we could knock off the loose dirt and bring them into the house.
Sweat dripped off my nose and chin as I admired them and thought: This was a good use of my time.
I have no plans to morph into a subsistence farmer, especially at my age, but I am more and more convinced that people should loop back to the 1930s and begin raising at least part of their own food.
One reason is that it just tastes good. Kindra roasted some of the Magic Mollies with onions and carrots and they were spectacular.
All were recently pulled from our container garden and had an earthy taste that you can’t duplicate with bought vegetables.
When I was a kid, gardening was a part of life. Most able-bodied people around Fitzhugh grew a garden. Some grew enough to have fresh vegetables in the summer, but for others it was survival. What they grew in the summer is what they would eat in the winter.
Women spent many a long hot day picking, preparing and canning their produce.
That was the case through the 1960s, if I recall correctly. It was in the ‘70s when things began to change.
There was more money and less time for weeding a garden, and there was plenty of affordable food on grocery store shelves.
The lifestyle continued changing until, now, gardens and preserving food are almost novelties. But things change and run in cycles.
I remember supper one summer night when I was 10 years old and asked my dad something about eating blackeyed peas.
My grandpa had been a sharecropper and went broke in 1935, when Dad was 10. Grandpa lost everything and there came a time when the family had nothing to eat except blackeyed peas.
That conversation stuck with me and I have tried to make sure, like my dad did, that my family always had plenty to eat.
I believe that the pendulum will swing back and food will again become scarce. Maybe not this year, maybe not next. But sometime.
There are too many people on the planet, too many abuses of the land and too many knuckleheads running the world’s governments.
If fuel and fertilizer prices get too high, production will drop and that will be the end of the supply of affordable food that we have known for so long.
You’ll see people start to dig up their back yards to plant seeds and relearn what their great-grandparents used to know about raising food. Community gardens will become popular.
And we’ll all be happier.
There is a comforting feeling of selfsufficiency in knowing you can grow food and help insulate yourself and your family from hard times.