Garden Chatter

Attending the Garden Expo in Madison recently filled my head with garden chatter.  For days, I kept replaying all of the great things I'd learned from the many excellent speakers.  One of the seminar presenters, Mark Dwyer of Rotary Gardens, noted how vital it is that we know where our vegetables come from. We live among generations today that are sadly not as close to the land as our forebears were. Hence, we don't always know where our food has come from. Or if we do, we see that it has likely traveled many miles or is so processed that it wouldn't even be recognizable as food by previous generations.  I heard a child, in all sincerity, one time refer to flavored chips as vegetables. The young boy had obviously had very little exposure to eating vegetables, let alone fresh bounty that came from a nearby garden, so he truly thought that the chips he ate were vegetables. When we tend to a garden, harvest the bounty, can it, freeze it, prepare it, taste it, buy it from a farmer's market, we know our food and from whence it came.  The recent difficult economy has driven many people to try their hand at gardening.  School gardens and community gardens are sprouting up.  Canning is becoming more popular once again.  It would be my wish that every person would have access to high-quality, locally grown produce to nourish their bodies.  Now that would be something to chatter about.