It is Earth Day. The environmental message of this day and the significance of observing this day for 50 years has been lost because of the pandemic. However, as any of us shelter at home, I have noticed that several of my acquaintances have decided this is the year to garden. Several have posted pictures of the seedlings they are starting in their basements.
I have an interesting personal history with gardening. I grew up on a farm working the large family garden with my siblings. I was actually more interested in the chores of weeding, hoeing, and picking than my brothers and sisters because I saw myself eventually teaching biology. This led to some personal projects that resulted in little food for the family, but were still tolerated by my parents. I remember taking a corner of the garden and trying to grow bentgrass for a putting green. Starting grass is not easy because you have to control weeds and like many of my “projects” that green never reached the stage at which it was useable.
My gardening interests also have an interesting tech connection. In the late 1990s, I became interested in the educational outreach of North Dakota Game and Fish. I implemented several projects for them (clipart collection) that explored technology for what at the time was an organization with no efforts in this area. Game and Fish purchased my first server to support an effort to encourage collaboration among schools that had been funded to create OWLS (Outdoor Wildlife Learning Sites). These sites were not vegetable gardens by gardens focused on native grasses, forbs, and trees as a way to encourage student awareness and appreciation of the outdoors.
School gardens are a thing particularly as a way to acquaint city kids with the origins of the food they eat and as a focus on healthy food. While often encouraged for this purpose, even those kids who now grow up on farms probably are not familiar with the cultivation of many of the fruits and vegetables they consume.
Back to gardens. I have kept some type of garden most of my adult life. I have not started my own plants the past few years, but I decided this year with time to kill I would get back into growing rather than purchasing plants. I now grow vegetables in raised beds and I have 10 beds that surround my back yard. We are still probably three weeks away from putting much in the ground.
