I love being out in nature, whether foraging for fungi in the woods, paddling my canoe, sitting on the beach or climbing mountains, I find it very satisfying and relaxing. When you have a garden you don’t actually need to go anywhere to get your fill of nature, you can enjoy it in the comfort of your own home, by just going outside. To me this is the greatest joy of the garden; it gives me a natural place where I want to spend my time. In one way the garden is even better than wild nature in that you can manipulate it; you can work with nature to make it more to your liking and more responsive to your needs.
Of course one of the greatest rewards of the food garden is the food it produces. I’m not just talking about your average supermarket standard food here, I am talking about the best food in existence. My spring Strawberries, summer Nectarines and winter Kale and carrots have all been blessed by the taste fairy and are astonishingly good. If there is a better apple than the Golden Delicious from my tree, it must be the one that Eve lured Adam with (or was it the other way around). This is all the more amazing to me because I always considered shop bought Golden Delicious apples to taste about as good as the box they were shipped in. There is some debate as to why home grown food tastes better, ranging from chemistry to autosuggestion, but I think that commercial growers just don’t put nearly as much love into their growing.
We have all been brainwashed to believe that producing food is an unpleasant necessity of life and that industrial agriculture liberated us from this chore, to go off and be ourselves (this was actually more like freeing the slaves, who were then free to go back and work on the same plantation, but that’s another story). The reality is that growing your own food is more of a pleasure than a chore and the occasional spell of hard work (look upon it as beneficial exercise that is much more meaningful than sweating in a gym) just makes the time when you are relaxing feel even better. It is wonderfully satisfying to help plants turn soil and sunlight into delicious food and then eat it.
Growing food connects you to the earth in a direct way that anyone can understand; it fills your stomach with things that came from the soil around you. Cook and eat a meal made completely from your garden and you will be on your way to developing a completely new relationship with your food and the natural world. Do this for long enough and your own body eventually comes to be made up of elements that came from a few square yards of soil in your garden. You don’t get any more connected to the earth than that.
The garden can also improve your health, as you get the ultimate fresh produce, packed with vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients, and you can eat them immediately before they start to deteriorate. If you are so inclined you can take this a lot further and grow some uniquely nutritious foods and herbs, enabling you to create your own superior food supplements, green drinks, raw foods and juices. This type of garden can return our diet to something like the diversity of our hunter gatherer ancestors.
Researchers in the Netherlands discovered that people who live near to natural areas had a lower incidence of physical and mental problems, which suggests that humans need to live near plants. This would explain why gardening is a powerful antidote to the stresses of modern life. The garden gives us a place where we interact with the natural world on an intimate physical level.
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