Our Gardens Can Save the World
I would like to reflect on this past year and give thanks to Sandra Martin, editor of Bay Weekly, for giving me a soapbox and allowing me to continue with a gardening column that Dr. Francis Gouin started. He was a great gardener and professor with a lot of wit and wisdom and one whose shoes I could never fill.
I always felt a kindred spirit with The Bay Gardener, as compost was his big love. When I married my husband I told him I had a big pile of “black gold” in my backyard. I’m not sure if he was disappointed when he saw my pile of compost.
I hope my 40 years of gardening experience is helpful to my readers. I’ve tried to impart the beauty of nature through the making of a garden for food, beauty and health. I hope you will be inspired to relish the plant world and hold it dearly as our climate instabilities wreak havoc on our world.
My hope is that you will be inspired to start a garden and enjoy it — without the use of harsh chemicals. Feel the pride of growing some of your own food, even if it’s just a salad garden in a pot. Pick a few lettuce leaves and a handful of cherry tomatoes and enjoy a homegrown salad and self-accomplishment.
Your garden is a place of wellness, as well. It makes you move and get exercise without realizing it. Even a small pot of mint can bring you the pleasure of a hot cup of mint tea that will soothe your stomach and heighten your spirit.
I encourage you to grow native plants and help the environment by restoring native insect populations, which help to restore our bird populations and more.
If you and I and everybody does a little bit to recycle via composting and feeding the soil so that you can grow healthier plants, just think of all the carbon that can be sequestered out of the atmosphere.
All those leaves, grass clippings, garden waste, animal manure, old Christmas trees and more can be turned into black gold. And it all can be made better with a cup of tea from the garden. Let’s look forward to more gardening for 2020.