I. Gardening at a Glance You Don't Have to Be Italian to Grow Good Peppers I have a customer who is the consummate "gardener from the old country." If he eats a delicious peach, he saves the pit and plants it somewhere in the yard. He has a one-third-acre lot in the middle of town, but if he eats a dozen good peaches in the season, he'll plant a dozen peach trees. Some of the peach pits do germinate, and one or two occasionally survive the ravages of the neighborhood kids and dogs, and my friend eventually gets peaches off them. But when one of the trees dies in the spring, does he cut it down? No. He plants pole beans at the base of the trunk. By summer the branches of the tree are covered with thousands of dangling beans. So he gets another crop out of the tree, dead or alive. It is in this man's make-up to grow things, not because he is Italian, but because he grew up in a family who happened to have a garden. I've noticed that many of our visitors to Nana's Garden, which is on the grounds of our garden center as a kind of demonstration plot, have an inferiority complex about gardening because they're not of Italian or Yankee heritage. In my part of the country, East-Coast Yankees and older Italians are believed to have the proverbial green thumb. I tell our visitors that good gardening is not in the genes. It's in the jeans--the pants you wear when you have to work hard at something. It's the product of knowledge and experience, and if you didn't grow up with a gardening background, you're going to have to acquire the knowledge and experience on your own, with the help of friendly neighbors, neighborly friends, and books like this one. Offhand, I can think of a veritable melting pot of outstanding gardeners among our customers--a Swede who specializes in early peas, a Scot with a knack for lettuces, an African-American who grows an amazing variety of medicinal herbs, a Greek who raises giant Spanish onions. . . . Obviously, vegetable gardening is not, cannot be, and should not be a contest among races, religions, and creeds. No one is born with a green thumb. Anyone can learn to garden successfully. All that aside, in case you ever want to win an argument about who may be the best gardeners in the world, I suggest you consider the implications of a list compiled by the United Nations ranking countries according to agricultural output per acre. It reveals that many of the nations small in geographical size are in fact the most productive in their farming techniques. The Top 10: Republic of China (Taiwan) United Arab Republic (Egypt) The Netherlands Belgium Japan Denmark Germany South Korea Sri Lanka Norway I'd just like to know what happened to the Italians. Why Bother? The ostensible reasons so many of my customers are turning to vegetable gardening are to save money and to eat better. Why are vegetables so expensive? There are fewer farmers growing them, mainly. Not long ago, New Jersey--known as the "Garden State"--announced it had lost tens of thousands of its traditional truck-farming acreage to soybean-farming enterprises. A single big-cash crop like soybeans happens to be a lot easier for a farmer to manage than a mess of vegetable fields. With world population expected to exceed 7 billion any minute now and to reach 9 billion by the year 2040, there is going to be a lot more pressure on farmers who are in the business of growing varied crops to either sell their land or convert their fields to the big basic crops. Truck farms are also being lost to real-estate developments all over the country, which is nothing new but it& Excerpted from Small-Plot, High-Yield Gardening: How to Grow Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well by Turning Your Back by Larry Sheehan, Sal Gilbertie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
