Grow some food.  For us, this has been so so important.  It’s hard to really explain in words the sensory pleasure of starting seeds, watching sprouts grow, setting out plants in the spring, tending them, and then harvesting and eating them.  To grow your own food is one of life’s greatest luxuries, and it’s sad to us how many people willingly give that luxury up for the sake of a false luxury called “convenience.”  But what is really convenient?  Stepping out into the darkening garden, as we did tonight, to pull up same carrots, wash and chop them, and eat them still singing with life?  Or using oil, driving in a car to a store to buy dead produce, with money earned to spare the “drudgery” of growing your own?

There’s just no explaining in words the satisfaction, and the taste of truly fresh food grown by your own hands.  A fresh egg, taken from the nest box and cracked in the pan – nothing can compare with that flavor, or with that nutritional value.  If our diet-obssesed, calorie-counting, vitamin-popping culture would only plant a few seeds, imagine the tastebud hallelujahs, the healthy bodies.

So often, guests at our table rave about how delicious the food is.  We always try to explain that the ingredients are the answer – we are not genius cooks, we are cooks who grow our food.  There will always be reasons not to start – try to find reasons to start.  When we moved to our current place, there was no tilled soil (it was all woods and grass), not enough sunlight, and incredibly rocky soils (we live on “The Ledge”).  We still don’t have ideal sun exposure, the soils are still crazy stony, but we grow a lot of food, for ourselves and the bakery.

Growing your own also can’t be beat for fostering connection to the land.  Without this connection, this daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, physical connection to the earth beneath, around, above us, we cannot hope to save her and ourselves.  If we are not connected, it is easy to think we don’t need the earth (which is of course, terrifyingly common and completely untrue).  What more can I say?  Get your hands dirty, be it in an herb pot in your window, your front lawn (which you probably currently spend time mowing), or the back forty.

Some books to get you going:

The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible: Discover Ed’s High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions by Edward C. Smith  (cheesy title – but the book we’ve used the most)

The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (A gardener’s supply book) by Eliot Coleman

Small Farmers Journal

and for the hard-core growers out there:

Weed the Soil, Not the Crop by Anne & Eric Nordell – you’ll have to send them a check in Pennsylvania to get it, but you can check out the introductory version here. (ordering info is at the end of the article)  Ben loves this so much he’s talking about screening the dvd at the bakery!