meeralee
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It’s a slow business, gardening. Planting, weeding, pruning—these things can’t be rushed, can’t be hurried. It takes patience, and that’s a rare commodity these days. Some poet called a garden ‘a lovesome thing,’ which is something only a poet would say. A garden is work. Good work, thoughtful work—but work. Weeds don’t surrender easily.
Like any sort of work, you need decent tools. They don’t have to be expensive tools, don’t have to be new and shiny—just good enough to get the job done. Me, I like old tools, tools that have been in the ground before and know their way around dirt and root. Decent tools and a pair of gloves. Some people say they like to feel the dirt, get it under their fingernails—those people are what I like to call ‘stupid.’ The less cleaning-up, the better.
It’s not about the romance of the soil, it’s not about poetry. Gardening is about hope and patience and a belief in the future. It’s about practical nurturing against the very real possibility of failure. It’s about insisting on freshness and flavor—in your food and in your life.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
