Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

I was going to write about the wonderful exercise I get in the garden, wonderful because I enjoy the activity, whereas working out at a gym has no appeal for me.  Then I thought of the many people who overdo it in the spring and end up with aching muscles.  This [...]

Our nation has been on a collision course with simple, natural living for quite some time. People in cities are crammed into high-rise apartment complexes, working 12 hours per day, eating fast food as a daily staple, and getting sicker by the minute.

In my last article , I discussed how to get started with your first vegetable garden and advised beginners to start small, a 6 x 6 plot being a good size to grow your own salad greens, pole beans, or potatoes. When you’ve seen success with this size, you can graduate to a serious plot of about 450 square feet and start growing a substantial portion of your food.

The days of growing up on a small organic farm in New Jersey were far behind me when I dug my first garden as an adult. It was only five or six feet square and done at my wife’s behest so she could have some home-grown tomatoes. We crowded in half a dozen tomato plants and a couple of short rows of potatoes using spuds from the store that had sprouted. We then neglected the patch pretty much until harvest. Amazingly we got tomatoes and potatoes.

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.