Dear Editor
On Page 1 of the Sept. 18 Regional Optimist there was an item informing readers that the Battlefords Horticultural Society will be closed down after 68 years. On Page 32, William Wardill, under "Down the back lane," grieves over the loss of gardens in Eatonia.
Gardening and music and neighbours: the past. To just write a little on gardens - vegetable and ornamental - there was a time when guests at a farm home in the summer would gravitate, men, women, and children, to those wonderful big vegetable gardens, lush with peas, carrots and corn. These were hand weeded, well weeded, before the gas powered garden tiller.
Now women married to farmers (notice I do not call them farm women) will say somewhat loftily, "Oh, I don't grow a garden; it's cheaper to buy everything." Oh? Is that some kind of new math?
It certainly explains why some people who once made a point of hiring farm youngsters now are cautious. For one thing, having never weeded a garden, these farm children are liable to pull the plants and leave the weeds. They are acreage kids, it's just that the acreages are huge.
Can anything beat the taste of the first lettuce and radishes, the peas and carrots fresh from the garden? Nearly every garden had cutting flowers such as sweet peas. Now gardeners can expect to eventually hear, "Oh, do you still bother with a garden?"
It's a privilege, not a bother. I grew up surrounded by five acres of orchard, vegetables grown for home and for commercial use as was the orchard, plus flowers, annual and perennial, so I got it through the pores. On one visit to the village from which came my mother's side of the family in England, I could walk around the streets, stopping to admire this or that and soon the gardener would be chatting, or the next door gardener. No bleakness there; a feast of colour all over. It's the same where my father's family originated, although high brick walls usually obscured the gardens.
The descendants of pioneers are losing touch with the soil. I've seen oil tanker trucks parked on what was once a former householder's pride - a pretty perennial garden. It's a sign of the times. It seems even farmers want to prove what I've said the modern farmer has become: a huge consumer. They don't want to grow even a head of lettuce, never mind a rose bush. Those who do are considered eccentric.
Christine Pike
Waseca
