Sympathy for the working-class gardener

Jill Severn portrait

JILL SEVERN'S GARDENING COLUMN

Time is a garden’s best friend

For today’s purposes, let’s define “working class” as everyone whose living depends on a job. It might be a great job with decent pay . . . or not. People in this situation – even those with the good jobs – face two major barriers to success in their gardens: time and money.

A person who works eight hours a day and sleeps eight hours at night has one more eight-hour stretch to tend to everything else: children, partners, friends and community; housework and laundry; shopping and cooking; learning and thinking. Vanishingly few can do it all and still have time to even mow the grass. It’s no wonder working people’s gardens are often weedy or that their owners live with near-constant regret about all they can’t quite get done.

Here's a lessons garden books ought to teach: the fewer hours a week a person works for a living, the better their garden is likely to be. Time is indeed the garden’s best friend – especially the gardener’s time.

Too many full-time workers have given up on their gardens altogether because their plants didn’t get watered, or their broccoli flowered before they remembered to harvest it.

Of course there are exceptions to this dour analysis; lots of working people do have thriving gardens, because they have made it a high priority to engineer time for them into their lives.

Parents who want to garden recruit their children to help, thus combining gardening and child care. They give their youngest fun things to do, like helping to plant strawberries with a promise of something delicious to come, poking holes in the soil for nasturtium seeds, or cutting flowers to make a bouquet. A talented parent might even convince little kids that weeding is fun, though it would probably be hard to convince a teenager.

Others plant a garden just outside the front door, so they see it every time they come home. Then they can harvest the broccoli on the way to the kitchen.

But then there’s the money problem.

Garden stuff – including plants – have not eluded inflation. Sometimes, that creates a bit of familial friction.

I met a man who is a long-time cultivator and collector of rock garden plants. His wife rolls her eyes and says, “He thinks he needs more plants.” It sounds like he always will – and she will always roll her eyes but put up with it. They’ve been married for decades.

The money problem is two-fold: garden stuff has gotten more expensive, and there is way too much of it.

There are, to be sure, things all gardeners need, like shovels, rakes, trowels, seeds, twine, stakes to hold up plants . . . and most gardeners would probably add a dozen more without pausing for breath. The fact that prices have risen for all of them is a common complaint.

But we really don’t need products like this one, available on Amazon: “Potato Grow Bags with Flap 10 Gallon, 4 Pack Planter Pot with Handles and Harvest Window for Potato Tomato and Vegetables, Black and Gray.”

The “Harvest Window” is a side flap you can lift to see how your potatoes are doing, and somehow reach inside and harvest a few. I’m trying to imagine how to do that without making a mess, as I assume (hope, actually), there is soil in there. I’m also wondering why anyone in their right mind would buy this product. 

There is soil beneath our feet, and potatoes will grow in it. And there’s no delivery charge.

To state the obvious: Gardening can become a consumer trap for the naive gardener.

There is also a vast array of products to make things grow, and products to kill things. They are also expensive and mostly unnecessary.

Gardening on a budget is a challenge to our DYI skills, and a challenge to learn how to rely more on the wealth nature provides and less on what the private sector provides.

To further mitigate the money problem, neighbors can share plants, tools and compost deliveries. We can share our harvests, too. Our own good nature with our fellow humans can augment the wealth the rest of nature offers us.

We just have to do the best we can with the time and money we’ve got. If we persevere, we keep finding ways to do more with less, and more with our neighbors, families and friends.

At its best, gardening is an act of love for our generous earth, and for the people we garden with and for. Finding time to invest in it may be challenging, but it pays excellent dividends.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com