Mario Bautista
The storied neo-noir film director Samuel Fuller observed, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.” This sums up the problem with winter: too realistic. When photographing a winter landscape, you must scrutinize the resulting image to detect any trace of color. Occasionally, a shrub’s foliage, berries, or a foraging robin will obligingly infuse the Beckettian void with a discreet jolt of color. The winter sun finds all things and dapples them with light.
This week, with the first day of spring, we joyously transition into a suddenly more vibrant realm and witness the first intimations of a snow-free technicolor extravaganza. Life is in color indeed, we live to enjoy reality.
Speaking of real pleasures, an inverse form of expansion rules the produce departments in retail stores large and small. I refer to the ever-rising costs of groceries and the commensurate shrinking of our family budgets. Could it be worse? For sure, a lot worse. In Weimar Germany in 1922, consumers paid 160 Marks (then $1) for a loaf of bread; by the end of 1923, a loaf cost a pocketbook-exploding 200 trillion Marks. Our current food cost pinch is on a tremendously smaller scale, but a pinch is a pinch.
The most anti-inflationary thing you can do is create and care for a seasonal or, in many regions in the south and west, a year-round garden. Growing your own vegetables delivers a ten-to-one return on what you’d pay in a store. A family’s annual store-bought produce budget is somewhere around $2,000 to $3,000. If you were to grow your own vegetables, herbs and fruits, it would cost you $200 to $300 for seeds, plants and fertilizer. Gives new meaning to “hedge fund.”
Any gardener will tell you that the monetary savings are just the beginning of the garden value proposition. First, you can never buy such delicious, nutritious vegetables in any store. Your home-grown bounty is alive with sense-reeling color, flavor, fragrance, and delectable texture—and loaded with nutrients. Instead of worrying about your food budget, you’re working in an earthly paradise.
Unlike their store-bought cousins, which travel hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, before alighting on store shelves, your home-grown vegetable crop—canned by the sun—journeys no further than to your kitchen, to take part in the culinary festivities.
Our population’s celebrated diversity is reflected in our vast range of garden vegetables and fruits, berries, leafy greens, podded and marrowed, rooted, stemmed and cabbaged. The director Sam Fuller probably wouldn’t know where to turn. After scratching his head, he might yell, “Cut!” and join the feast of the alternately shining and luminous multicolored spread of produce found in the ever more ubiquitous and increasingly varying American Garden.
George Ball is chairman of the W. Atlee Burpee Co. and past president of The American Horticultural Society. herrlueffle@gmail.com
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