Low-brow gardening

Morning temp: 48F
Afternoon high: 68F
Tonight's projected low: 51F
Humidity: 58%
Moon: Waning, 21%

A clear, sunny, cool day, with a West wind at 8 mph!

1. After a month of rigorous double-digging, it seems I've hit a temporary lull in Garden work. For today, I'll be watering, weeding the mostly empty beds (save for two beds of winter crops) and adding a bit to the compost pile. Oh yes, and sitting out by the peach trees listening to the bluebirds. Frankly, I'll take this brief respite, knowing that we'll soon be moving several dozen plantlings from the A-Frame indoors to the Garden. We've been putting these plantlings outside on the reasonably warm afternoons for the past three weeks in an effort to "harden them off", that is, get them used to the changing conditions that wind, sun and clouds bring (as opposed to the staid conditions underneath grow-lights in our living room). I hope we can get them into the Garden by Monday or Tuesday. They've grown so well indoors that they're becoming root-bound, so they need to be out in the wide open soil of freshly turned and fertilized Garden Beds!

2. In France, some 50% of the population gardens regularly, either on land of their own, or on rented plots. Even in major cities some 20% have gardens. Here in the U.S., we haven't seen that level of interest since the mid-1940s, when Victory Gardens appeared in every neighborhood across the nation. In those days, our national logic held that each family should grow as much of its own food as was possible, and thus conserve our resources, as they would be needed for the war effort. Note how this varies from our own times, when we are urged to purchase and use up as much as possible to keep the economy growing, and thus "do our part". In the old days, we made sacrifices by only eating the lettuce, tomatoes and peppers we could grow ourselves, and seriously cutting back on our consumption of meat, diary and a wide range of other luxuries and necessities; today we sacrifice by charging HD plasma TVs to our already burgeoning credit cards. And our attitudes toward gardening have grown similarly odd. Here in the Southeast, for instance, we've noticed that a great many subdivisions have strict rules forbidding gardening. We've met folks who were warned that if they dug-up their lawn for a vegetable garden, the Neighborhood Association (NA) had the power to foreclose on their mortgage, and would do so without hesitation. Apparently, in the eyes of a great many NAs, putting in a vegetable garden is likened to heaving your old, rusted-out pick-up truck up on cement blocks and letting it sit for a year or two, or leaving engine-blocks and transmissions strewn about one's front yard. M and I have often wondered about this perception of gardening as low-brow.