Total Health Breakthroughs: Alternative Solutions for Mind, Body, and Spirit

Whether following a garden talk or being introduced to a party of four in our restaurant as the “farmer who grows the vegetables,” it is inevitable that someone will say, “You must have a green thumb. I can’t grow anything.” My response is, “Not so much a green thumb as a brown knee.”

Check out my work jeans, or if it’s a hot day, check out my knees. There will be garden soil on at least one, even if I’ve only been out there a few minutes. It’s kind of like an adult dropping down on a knee to talk with a child. I drop down on a knee at the sight of a weed.

Here is my answer to those who say they don’t have a green thumb, and to those who might be afraid they won’t be able to master the mysteries of gardening. To get a green thumb, you need to have some success growing something.

Having written a garden column for 20 years for the local paper, I’m probably the best-known gardener in the area. I now plant over half an acre in vegetables each year. But this year cutworms wiped out my first two plantings of lettuce and all my zucchini plants died about two weeks after they started producing.

I have not been able to get a decent stand of spinach for the past five years. Discouraging? You bet — but also challenging. If gardening didn’t present me with challenges, I suspect I would become bored and look for something more challenging.

On hearing Barbra Kingsolver promote her new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I thought, “been there done that.” She and her family moved to a farm and vowed that for one year they would eat only food they grew themselves or that was raised locally. My wife, also Barbara, and I moved to our farm in Maine 35 years ago and have been living close to the land ever since.

I too, wrote a book about our experience of raising the majority of our food — which I titled Gardening for Independence.

We were part of the “back to the land” movement of the 1970s. I don’t know that any of us in this so-called movement knew we were part of any movement. Some say they were influenced by Scott and Helen Nearing — early green living pioneers. We weren’t. For us, it is just the way things worked out.