Hijacked!

As a teen growing up in Richmond in the early 1970’s, from my home several miles away I could watch the planes approaching the Vancouver airport in long lines.  Most often they were west bound using the east-west runway.  Occasionally, when the winds were contrary they would take off heading east on that same runway.  Rarely did they use the other diagonal runway.  But one sunny day when I was outside, a large airliner flew low right over our house heading southeast towards the States.  I knew that wasn’t normal, something was haywire.  Later I learned that it had been hijacked and was bound for Cuba.  Those where the days before security checks, when most everyone smoked on the plane, the flight attendants were called stewardesses who wore very short skirts and occasionally someone would board the plane with a gun and demand: “Tak me to Cooba”

 

Sadly it was about that time that the word Gardening was also hijacked.  Before then Gardening was about growing vegetables and if one grew flowers it was done in a flower bed or rose garden, not a Garden.  But times have changed and so have the books and periodicals on gardening.  In the seventies the Rodale Press magazine was called Organic Gardening and Farming.  Later the Farming was dropped and today it’s called Organic Living.  It now contains articles on flowers and water gardens and is full of recipes and pictures of people’s new kitchens and other feel good things. There’s a lot less vegetable gardening listed there now.

 

Today’s book stores and libraries have the same problem.  Oh so many books on growing everything but vegetables.  There are some good books on vegetable growing but they’re lost in the forest of other books.  Also there are a majority of vegetable books that are written in the mid-west, southern and eastern coast USA.  These are just not that useful for us in the coastal Pacific North West where the spring is often cool and wet and the summers dry and rainless.  Varieties of vegetables that may ripen and taste good in other parts of the continent may do poorly here in our Fraser Valley.  Or they may need special care and techniques to produce in our climate.

 

Here I hope to share my experiences, successes and even crop failures of my 35 years as a backyard organic vegetable grower.  It seems I never stop learning.  But I have acquired some valuable skills that can be shared with others who believe that Gardening should be about growing vegetables.  Perhaps others can use some of this information too.

 

Happy Gardening (vegetables that is)

M.R. Tumnus.