(The following is the speech I gave to The Garden Writers Association last night at their annual convention in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Despite the familiar first sentence and a few other tropes, it’s a new piece.  Enjoy!)

2009 has been one extraordinary year in the history of American gardening.

As if on cue, a panoply of developing trends all pointed gardenwards, opening the garden gates to the most dramatic resurgence in American gardening since the Great Depression.

Of course, the current economic slump has proven an effective recruiting tool for new gardeners, who reap extraordinary savings by growing their own fruits and vegetables.

But the financial quagmire is just one of many causes for the cornucopia of new gardeners.

One contingent has started gardening due to well-founded concerns about food safety. This fussy crowd, it seems, prefers produce that hasn’t been mass-produced, shipped thousands of miles, exposed to carbon monoxide, and then gassed with ethylene.

The slow food movement, which emphasizes the freshness and flavor locally grown produce, has inspired many, who now harvest their own food right in their very local backyard.

Then there are the new epicureans, foodies who would no sooner dine on a hothouse tomato than serve spam as an entrée. That chorus of oohs and ahs issuing from the garden is the characteristic mating call of the foodies—summoning their partner to come and marvel over the serene delicacy of sweet corn, the sublime fragrances issuing from the tomato patch and the sensuous blue-black hues of the zaftig eggplant.

The thundering herd of gardeners over there? Why, that is the stampede of Baby Boomers, now nearing retirement. The Boomers’ children having flown the nest, this super-sized demographic has increasingly discovered a creative and rewarding form of recreation. The Baby Boomers’ landing in the garden reminds me of Arthur Koestler’s maxim: “Recreation is re-creation.”

The wide-eyed group over there, in plaid shirts and overalls?  They are seekers after something they have been unable to find on the internet, a wide-screen TV or their iPhone: authenticity. They are by now a little disenchanted with life in webville. They saw themselves as rulers in the empire of information: only to discover they were mere clickstreams, cookies and avatars in a corporate web. But in the garden they go from virtual to virtuous, their efforts rewarded with nourishment, flavor and beauty. In the garden they can connect to their planet, the seasons and themselves. Here, among the plants and flowers, the only tweets come from the birds.

The fitness craze has engendered its own gardening army. You can’t miss this crowd. They’re running, bicycling, or at the gym. When they aren’t busy burning calories and subduing their heart rate, you might see them in the supermarket, scrutinizing the labels on boxes and cans lest a gram of transfat or corn syrup corrupt the temples of their bodies.

Now the fitter than thou have jogged into the Great American Garden because they want to fortify their well-tuned bodies with the freshest, most nutritious food they can find. Soon fitness magazines will blazon headlines like “Turn Your Mulch to Muscle Power,” and “Weed Your Way to Fab Abs.”

To confirm that this is the Year of the Gardener, President Obama decided to create a vegetable garden on the grounds of the White House. Tens of thousands of new gardeners burst into bloom. Hail to the Chief Gardener!

It’s a new world that we – gardening writers and gardening companies – find ourselves. Just minutes ago, we were the old economy, a fragrant, sleepy corner of the American commerce, where bees accounted for most of the buzz. Newspaper editors and television producers gave even more space and time to celebrities and mindless controversies. Consumers seemed increasingly consumed by electronic gadgetry that kept them up-to-the-minute on the price of everything and the value of nothing. Going into the 21st century, everything—commerce, tastes, trends, news—seemed to be spinning faster and faster.

The English writer G.K. Chesterton wrote of what he called “mankind’s favorite game,” which he called, “Cheat the Prophet.” Writing at the dawn of the 20th century, when writers like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were prophesying mankind’s destiny, Chesterton explains how “Cheat the Prophet” is played. “The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.”

If the trend forecasters, cool hunters and secular prophets of our time foresaw this Great Garden Revival, they were uncharacteristically quiet about it. Or maybe, because I was in my garden, I failed to notice them.

Brothers and sisters of the garden, we are privileged witnesses of and participants in a new era of gardening. As gardening’s champions, we all need to do a better job inspiring those new to gardening and better serving the needs of veteran gardeners.

Gardening is front-page news this year. Americans who have never touched a trowel are now aware of the White House garden, the savings they can reap from growing their own, and the nutritional bonanza that is the home garden. Michael Pollan, among other writers, has made Americans keenly aware of what is at the end of their forks. The great Tomato Blight of 2009 became fodder for newspaper editorials.

Gardeners are coming to us. Millions more gardeners are waiting in the wings; underground, in a state of latency, like seeds they await the day the earth grow moist and warm, and the sun burn brighter, before they burst into bloom.

Dr. Coué, the early 20th century proponent of the power of positive thinking, created the mantra, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” The gardening business and writers now need to every day, in every way, get better and better.

To help make the Great American Garden a 21st century reality, we have to show conviction, ingenuity and enterprising spirit. Wannabee gardeners need to be supported with easily accessible information and inspiration. We need to promote the garden’s role in our schools and communities. Our veteran gardeners should have instant access to answers for their gardening questions.

Up to now, gardening has been an insular culture. We are believers all, and there is a reassuring familiarity—not without its charms—that pervades our books, catalogs, websites and articles. By contrast, look back at seed catalogues from the 19th century—and well into the 20th—there is an excitement, a sense of discovery, a “wow factor” that pervades their pages.

Gardening will always have its dreamy, otherworldly component; the garden may well be the last vulgarity-free zone in our culture. Yet, as people blessed with a passion, let’s share this passion with our readers, editors and customers. The garden’s extraordinary rewards and delights are welcome news—an antidote to much that’s wrong with civilization. My Fellow Gardeners, our moment has arrived. Let’s make the most of it.

On this, my 200th blog, I get to say whatever I want in a top ten list, in no special order. 

They don’t make Labor Day like they used to.

The shifting forms and meanings of labor have rendered Labor Day our most nebulous national holiday. For example, in gardening—a leisure activity—Labor Day is incorrectly considered the close of the season. For holiday-goers, it marks the end of summer—despite schools regularly starting weeks before the first Monday of September, and the calendar signaling the estival end two weeks later. Vacations and education seem conceptually quite remote from the industrial world that gave Labor Day its original meaning.

However, before some savvy marketer comes along to rebrand Labor Day (points of difference, unique selling propositions, call to action, etc.), let’s first decide what we are talking about when we talk about labor.

Labor has its roots in the Garden of Eden. In the Book of Genesis, God, divinely piqued by Adam and Eve’s snacking on the apple plucked from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, condemns mankind to a life of work.

God tells Adam the rest of his life will be given to labor, as a result of sin. “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree, about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it’, cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.”

Adam, Eve, and their descendents—namely us—got off lightly. The Old Testament God had a notably short fuse, punitive streak and large arsenal of reprisals. Compared with plagues, earthquakes and floods, a life sentence of labor seems lenient.

But for God’s punishment, it’s hard to imagine how people were going to acquire their nourishment. Would grapes fling themselves into waiting mouths? Lettuce toss itself into bowls? Eggplants daub themselves in olive oil, roast themselves and vault upon the tongue? God’s decree created not only labor, but also the world’s oldest profession: gardening.

Since that awkward afternoon in the Garden of Eden, labor has been our fate. But its role, meaning and value are ever changing. For some, “labor” denotes unions like the UAW and Teamsters; but the American labor union is now an endangered species, vanishing faster than an Arctic glacier. In 1945, more than one-third of employed Americans belonged to unions; union membership stands now at 12.5%. If you exclude government unions, the number shrinks to 7.8%.

For others, “labor” might imply work performed at a place of business, whether office or factory. Today, though, the divide between company and home, work and leisure, is increasingly blurred. Americans are at work everywhere—you can’t avoid them. Homes, cafes, parks, libraries, trains, planes, cars, and even sidewalks now comprise the Great American Office—a 24/7 virtual workplace extending and interconnecting wherever there are radio waves or fiber optic cable.

Increasingly, modern-day workers rely more on their heads than on muscular or manual skill to stoke the new hybrid engine of American commerce. Liberated from the dictates of timeclocks and the confines of cubicles, today’s “knowledge workers” view their Bedouin work life as a major advance over their parents’ 9-5 corporate grind and light years from the sweaty daylong exertions of workshop and field.

Such workers exult in what they view as their new freedom and flexibility. Their cherished Blackberries, I-Phones and netbooks liberate them from humdrum office life. This love affair with technology smacks of what Marxist theory terms “false consciousness”—the failure to recognize that the instruments of personal oppression and exploitation are self-imposed. It’s also a romance the modern union bosses have a rough time finding room in. Thus, most New Age labor is neither especially gilded, much less gilded. In our mercurial 21st century marketplace, job security, fringe benefits and health plans are sometimes as rare as sightings of Cesar Chavez.

When it comes to etymology, the word “labor”, like all indispensable words—”human”, “culture”, etc.—derives from agriculture, specifically the word for plough. Only since 1835 has the general term “labor” served to designate a broad category of workers. Until then, “labor” meant onerous work, travail.

Yet, there is one place where the meaning of labor can be freed of ambiguity, alienation and anomie. To get there, let’s go right back to where we, and labor, trace our origins: the garden.

In the garden we can rediscover labor’s original—and perhaps even prehistoric—meaning, purpose and satisfaction. I foresee that the garden will emerge, repurposed, and become an essential new element of not just the nation’s evolving life style, but also a more familiar, less alienated conjunction of work and pleasure.

On this Labor Day, consider how supplying your family with fresh, nutritious and safe homegrown food is one job that will not be downsized, where you will always be your own boss, and where you truly reap the fruits of your labors. Here truly is a labor of love.

2009 has been one extraordinary year in the history of American gardening.

As if on cue, a panoply of developing trends all pointed towards the garden, opening the gates to the most dramatic resurgence in American gardening since the Great Depression. First and foremost, the current economic slump has proven an effective recruiting tool for new gardeners, who reap extraordinary savings by growing their own fruits and vegetables.

The cornucopia of new gardeners has gravitated to the garden for a range of reasons. One contingent started gardening due to well-founded concerns about food safety. The locavore movement, with its emphasis on acquiring locally grown produce, has inspired many, who now harvest their own food right in their local backyard.

Hear that? The chorus of oohs and ahs is the sound of gardening’s epicures, foodies besotted with the taste of ten-minute old broccoli, European tomatoes and exotic herbs from the garden.

The thundering herd of gardeners over there? Why, those are the Baby Boomers, nearing retirement, their brood of children having flown the nest, who have discovered a creative and rewarding form of recreation. The wide-eyed group over there, in plaid shirts and overalls? They are the seekers, looking for something they have been unable to find on the internet, a wide-screen TV or their iPhone: authenticity. In the garden they connect to their planet, the seasons and themselves.

The trend towards healthier lifestyles has engendered a veritable gardening army: they’ve landed in the Great American Garden because they want to fortify their well-tuned bodies with the freshest, most nutritious food they can find. And when the President and First Lady decided to create a vegetable garden on the grounds of the White House, tens of thousands of new gardeners burst into bloom. Hail to the Chief Gardener!

Gardening is, by its nature, a serene corner of the cultural landscape. Other than the occasional cacophony of crows squawking for our fresh sweet corn, we don’t get much excitement around here. We gardeners comprise one of the quieter interest groups in the land, our murmured bromides all but drowned out by garrulous trout fishermen and vociferous birdwatchers. Gardeners reckon life not in minutes, hours or days, but seasons.

Yet, bewilderingly, one key ingredient is missing from this great new flowering of the American garden: flowers. While sales of vegetables, herbs and fruit seeds have surpassed the wildest hopes of the country’s nurseries, there has been a commensurate drop-off in the sales of flower seeds and plants. In these belt-tightening days, it appears America’s gardeners seem to regard flowers as somehow superfluous, a luxury to dispense with in tough times.

In flower gardening, your rewards are reckoned, not in salads, soups and souflés, vitamins, antioxidants or fiber. The pleasures derived from flower gardening speak not to the body but to the human spirit.

When dining at restaurants, and there is a bud vase or a small bouquet of fresh flowers on the table, I often perform a feat of legerdemain for my dining companions. With a dramatic sweep of my arm, I snatch the flower vase and conceal it under the table. “Now,” I ask, in my best magician voice, “see anything different?”

It never fails: my companions instantly recognize something significant is now missing from the table – and it’s not just a vase with a lily or two. It’s as if a divine light switch has shut off, and the table, aglow and alive just moments ago, now looks dead, drained of beauty and warmth. Once the vase is back on the table, the flowers’ magic is back at work, lighting up the table, and dancing in the eyes of my companions, whose relief is unmistakable.

The effect of my floral disappearing act is no fluke. Science is just now beginning to apprehend the effects of flowers on our lives and surroundings.

A recent Rutgers study set out to explore the impact of cultivated flowers on human emotions. Flowers, when presented to women, unfailingly evoke the Duchenne smile: the term of art for the spontaneous teeth-baring grin of delight and gratitude. Flowers, researchers discovered, exercise an instant impact on happiness, with lasting effects of boosting mood, enjoyment and life satisfaction, diminishing depression and anxiety. Flowers make the home more welcoming and create positive emotional feelings in visitors. People who buy more flowers are happier. In this anxious, uncertain time, flowers are no luxury, but a blissful necessity.

My grandfather prospered during the Great Depression by growing sweet peas and violets. Not only were they popular, they were essential to combating depression. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw also similar streaks of popularity in cosmetics, movies and inexpensive mass entertainment, such as the hugely popular Century Of Progress back in my hometown of Chicago.

But there’s more: the flowers you grow in your garden have significant advantages over purchased flowers, which are days old, and often exposed to carbon monoxide and other pollutants, in their cultivation and shipping.

Your flower garden is not only harmonious, colorful and fragrant, it will also enhance the value of your home. Ask any realtor. Plus, the flowers you gather will have a radiance and freshness money can’t buy – and at a fraction of what they would cost at retail.

The tribe of new American gardeners who have opted out of flowers are missing much of the garden’s magic, beauty, harmony, color and fragrance. Right now, they can plant fall flowers, as well as bulbs to bloom next spring. I hope they will conduct their own experiment with flowers in the garden and the home. Their glittering Duchene smiles will be all the proof I need that the experiment has proven a success.

This growing season at Fordhook has been frightening. Normally, I expect a couple of monsoon like periods, a few days in late May, and another few days in late July and a couple in late August, max. However, for 2009 the reverse has been true. The only normal days have been, all combined, about one week. Just a couple of days longer than the time it takes a carton of milk to spoil – that has been the extent of our warm season. Forget about tomato sauce. We even had a record year for lightening. And now this darkest of summers is nearly over.

However dreadful it has been on the vegetables, our “anti-summer” has been little different from a slightly gloomier-than-average English summer. In a word, this summer has been “nirvana” for our perennials.

Ideally, perennial gardens resemble symphonic orchestras, as is often mentioned in popular gardening books. Except that, instead of the normal 80 to 90 musicians playing, say, “The 1812 Overture”, you have 5 or 6. This makes Tchaikovsky sound a bit weird, to say the least. So, it’s not a very good analogy. If you’re looking for a big symphonic sweep, you need a crew of full time gardeners and several acres of land, at minimum.

I always like to listen to a symphonic orchestra, or orchestral symphony, or whatever it is. It has a very satisfying feeling. It reminds me of the Talking Heads song, “Heaven”, when he says that heaven is a bar where everyone leaves at “exactly the same time”. Good line!

Perennial gardens are just as dreamlike or fantastic – they never bloom anywhere near the same time. Thus, the reality is you have to zoom right in on your favorite candidate and love him, or her, up. (I always think of plants as “hims” or “hers”. Generally, the girls outnumber the boys.)

Recent brain research has found that the eye picks up the “macro” and “micro” simultaneously – that we focus not on either but on both at once. Perhaps this is what the ancient eastern philosophies called the “third eye”. In any case, our brains get a powerful, multi-focal workout in a large perennial garden.

Once a friend of mine said his garden was “heroic” in that there’s always one perennial showing off at any given time. Sometimes, he said, it amounted to a lone, comedic sort of performance – a stand-up solo, so to speak. Nothing else was even trying to bloom. Other times, the “hero” was dominant over a lesser, subordinate – or supporting – cast. More like a “concerto”.

At our new perennial and ornamental shrub gardens at Fordhook Farms, just as at the first Heronswood in Kingston, the successional nature of the plantings is so strong that there are always several heroes competing for favor. More like Babylon than Jerusalem. The original “heronistas” would say all roads lead to Kingston, as was the case last Sunday, August 30th, when we opened Mecca’s doors for a warm and sunny day’s reception, with all proceeds going to The Garden Conservancy. We had almost 400 guests in 6 hours!

The dates for the next Open House weekends are Fordhook Fall Open, Friday & Saturday, September 25 & 26 in Doylestown; and then the very next Sunday, October 4th, at Heronswood West in Kingston, Washington. Technically, you could go to both, if you have a lead foot – in a hybrid car.

Hope to see you there!

It is always an unusual event when you copy someone else and end up discovering that you made the original.

As I mentioned last winter in “Camp Obama“, the President and First Lady might have considered breaking ground on their starter garden in private rather than in public.

Maybe it’s just my innate sense of caution, but I feel that they would have had a luckier outcome up in the hills of Maryland rather than the klieg-lighted fishbowl of the White House. However, kudos to the administration for giving it a try.

The problem, apparently, is they didn’t do a soil test to discover the toxic waste in the sludge in the lawn. Nevertheless we at Burpee were so inspired by the First Lady that we created an exact replica of the White House garden here at Fordhook Farm. We simply used the diagram they provided and as close an approximation of the cultivars as we could guess.

You can see the results in the photos below. Thank goodness, we didn’t have any lead or heavy metals in our soil. We simply used a little bit of granular fertilizer at the beginning of the season.

In order to complete the scene for the press release shown below, I decided to wear white–as in White House–and include my black dog, Nathan, as in “Bo”.

We planted a second sowing of salad greens and brassicas for the fall. These pictures were taken just a couple days ago. Anyone who takes us up on our offer to join us at our Fall Heronswood Open will be able to see the White House Garden for themselves. Since the president’s staff down in D.C. is replacing the soils at the site, the gardens aren’t there anymore. Therefore, what started out as a copy, became the original.

Hope to see you at the Open, September 25 and 26.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BURPEE VERSION OF WHITE HOUSE GARDEN REAPS BOUNTIFUL HARVEST

President Obama’s decision to plant a garden at the White House has been welcome news to both America’s gardeners and non-gardeners.
Inspired by the First Family’s example, W. Atlee Burpee & Co. decided to plant its own version at Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, PA. Fordhook is where the nation’s leading home gardening company trials most of the vegetables it sells by catalogue, at retail stores and on the internet. According to the man responsible, the garden’s results have been outstanding.

“The White House Garden has done a great job of showcasing the advantages of growing your own vegetables,” says George Ball, chairman of Burpee and proprietor of Fordhook Farm. “In creating our Fordhook version of the garden, we chose to make some alterations in what we planted in view of soil conditions and typical weather conditions experienced over a long period of time.”

“While we included some heirloom varieties,” Mr. Ball notes, “We were careful to include hybrids that we felt would produce in greater quantities and superior quality.”

“Gardeners in the Northeast who planted heirloom tomatoes organically this year had a poor harvest–due to the long spell of gray, damp days that resulted in the well-known Tomato Blight of 2009. Most heirlooms had no resistance to this blight. There was little even the most experienced gardener could do to contain it.”

What will happen to the bountiful harvest predicted for Burpee’s White House Garden?

“We have an Autumn Garden Tour which will be open to the public scheduled for September 25 & 26,” says Mr. Ball. He adds, “We are considering a special Presidential Luncheon if President Obama or The First Lady could attend. As fellow gardeners, we will have plenty to talk about.” Plans for the luncheon menu will include a full range of freshly harvested vegetables.

The proverbial naïve optimist brought low by reality, Candide might be the first modern hero.  Certainly, he was the first modern gardener.  In the image popularized by the 18th century French novelist Voltaire—”tending your own garden”—Candide is a metaphor for pursuing, and enduring, one’s own path, perhaps even “minding your own business”, in the best sense of the phrase.

However, it is compelling that Voltaire chose the garden as his example.  He prophesied the concepts of not only the uniqueness of the individual and the modern notions of individuality, but also our infamous cultivation of the self.  Perhaps even the extreme example of the 20th century’s “cult of personality”—an individual separated from the pack or community, just as a garden is cut off from the hustle and bustle of daily life—is an outgrowth of Candide’s famous garden plot.

A bright star in the enlightened galaxy of French literature, Voltaire was popular and influential throughout the world.  The horticultural image he created, probably while working in his own estate garden, contributed to the new spirit of the entrepreneur in the emerging Industrial Revolution.  Our modern definition of the marketplace stems from Candide: a gathering spot for the fruit of one’s labors, as well as those of many other individuals.  After all, Voltaire wrote in the late 1700s, the time of the first modern democratic revolutions. For example, if there is a “marketplace of ideas”, in today’s parlance, then there must be “idea gardens” where they grow.  This concept spurred his pioneering efforts in creating the world’s first encyclopedia—a tree of knowledge, indeed, and an early ancestor of the Internet.

Perhaps it was even Voltaire who most ennobled the common merchant and laid the groundwork, the “soil”, for the growth of the modern businessman—someone pragmatic and, literally, common, yet resolved to making something enduringly good.

No wonder, then, that he chose the gardener as his metaphor.  For example, capitalists engage with the “common market”, or the trading place of those commodities that are comprised mostly of grains, fruits and vegetables.  The buyers and sellers of these goods laid the foundation of Wall Street.

For what is “fruit” but the fruit of the gardener’s labor?  Not only does one “invest” oneself in agriculture and gardening, but the image of the garden resonates in the Parable of the Talents.  Maybe Voltaire was being sly, and actually advocating a lesson of scripture in disguise.  This Biblical episode would seem to be the historic first appearance of the paradigm that created the modern industrial world.

Thus, today’s ordinary citizens “grow” their portfolios, as if each was a unique garden.  Stocks grow or, neglected, catch diseases and die.  With the clumsy tools we have now, investing has become as perilous as getting out of Oz.  As Dorothy said, “We must cross this strange place in order to get to the other side.”  Compared to today’s investors, she had it easy.

Ironic, then, that many experts cite as the greatest risk takers of all to be—not stockbrokers or hedge fund managers—but the American farmer, who risks his crops to both the weather and the commodity markets where the farmers’ “fruits” are betted against each other.  The goal is that society always benefits from the lowest prices.  However, the farmer gains only in the tricky balance between one neighbor’s success and another’s failure.  Think of Las Vegas and you get the idea.

How does the recent explosion of interest in gardening help us redefine our denatured concept of “work”?  Perhaps the homegrown vegetable trend will lead us back to the garden where “labor” possesses its original meaning and purpose.  Home and community gardens can become part of the nation’s new life style, just as the small farm can become a rejuvenated part of the nation’s industry.

Autumn does not have to be the season of despair.  As we labor into fall, we can resolve that our jobs of supplying family and neighbors with fresh, delicious food will never be outsourced.  With a new grove of perennial fruit trees and bushes, and an asparagus, garlic and rhubarb patch—all ideal for planting this season—your garden will grow in size.  Indeed, it may be only the small farm, community and home garden that possess, in large measure, the two greatest ingredients of work:  a tangible bounty and a sense of personal satisfaction. 

And, there’s one unique bonus at this particular company:  You will be the only person who will ever fire yourself.  But I believe, after the first bite, you will have a job for life.

At 100,000 miles, a car is just getting started. Therefore, it makes no sense for the government to pay folks to turn in cars that are not even broken, much less broken in. In fact, a car improves with age. It acquires a depth of personality and character that only time confers. Like a pet, a car becomes a member of the family.

Who can forget his father lovingly tending a 1957 Chevy that was 15 years old? He polishes it regularly and drives it carefully. Go to any of the car shows that are held this time of year and behold the crowds. There are even clubs and fan sites for cars with a mere ten years of life. For example, I’m a big fan of the Toyota Tercel. Had I been smarter, I would have collected them when they were commonplace back in the 90s. It was an absurdly wonderful car–the epitome of basic transportation. The coupe was extraordinarily roomy.

Yet today, the government urges us to replace a distinguished workhorse with something that is merely new, but not necessarily good, better or even particularly innovative. Also, it seems crazy to use taxpayer money in order to stimulate the taxpayer to buy a car from a taxpayer-owned company. I’m not an economist, but I think this makes little sense.

Nor am I convinced that a 10-15 year old car that has been well cared for is especially less fuel-efficient or spews substantially greater carbon than a brand new car. Depending on the driver’s habits, such as aggressive accelerating, a new car can be just as bad for the environment as an old one that is more gently pushed. Also, it is well known that new cars, indeed, have a lengthy break-in period. Perhaps 100,000 miles is a bit of an exaggeration, but 25,000 is not.

For instance, an elderly couple may use a car for shopping, going to church and visiting their grandson at the state college once or twice a year. It will often become a 10-15 year old car that has 50,000 to 75,000 miles–just reaching its prime. Why should a pair of senior citizens be lured, in effect, to waste not only good money but also a perfectly fine automobile on an effort to aggrandize the image of a bankrupt domestic automobile manufacturer or two?

Consider grandma and grandpa’s car: it gets good, “modern” mileage; it’s extremely comfortable for four people; and, being of recent vintage, it releases little more carbon or other pollutants into the atmosphere than a brand new one. On the other hand, the new car will be usually lighter (partly contributing to the better mileage). Also, it will have less insulating material. In addition, most new interior designs have reduced head and legroom to achieve sleeker body styles to cut down wind resistance and boost mileage. Therefore, it might be less comfortable too. With the $4,500 in their hands, the grandparents probably won’t mind.

The siren call of novelty is machined into our collective psyche. Perhaps it is hard wired into our emotions by the change of seasons, along with the many festivals that we celebrated during the long pagan era. The season of spring remains a great surprise, even after thousands of years of evolution and custom.

Our companies–The Cooks Garden and Burpee–feature new plants every spring on the cover and the front section of our catalogues and websites. These exciting new plants, seeds and bulbs comprise over 30% of our annual revenue. It runs like a clock every year–first thing our customers ask is, “What’s new?” I know this to be a fact. So who am I to talk?

I suppose I am driven, so to speak, by the pathetic image of a soundly functioning automobile being destroyed. Of course, the misnomer, “clunker”, is not even meaningful. The government does not want a defective automobile–it just wants an old one. Most of all, they want us to buy new ones, thereby stimulating our economy, according to their odd calculus.

Maybe it’s the gut-wrenching feeling I get when I know that a perfectly fine example of the most sophisticated industrial consumer product in world history is being squashed like a bug. A car that is “A-OK”–thumbs up, ready to roll.

Setting aside both economic and psychological values for the moment, what does this say about the “ecosystem” of the car maintenance and repair business? Anyone think about those guys? Sort of throws a wrench into the works, as I see it. How many skilled jobs are going to be lost as a result of repair shops closing down, since there suddenly will be thousands of “old” cars taken out of their market? What about their dignity after the government says that their work is of no value? They have families too.

Finally, it is a bad lesson to our youth to focus obsessively on the shiny and new. “All that glitters is not chrome”, to paraphrase the old saying. Let’s keep cars around for a while. Either kids learn the virtues of care, patience and commitment or they suffer an adulthood of persistent restlessness and a vague but endless yearning for the next hot thing.

Age is “cool”.

Viva Clunkers!

Here in the Northeast, we’re experiencing the coldest, wettest and darkest summer in recent memory.  The tomato crops of many farm and home gardens have been decimated by a disease that thrives on just this sort of weather.  The disease is late blight, caused by a water mold named Phytophthora infestans.  The severity and incidence of the disease is the worst that anyone can remember.

Several important and timely lessons can be taken from the destruction of these farm and home garden tomato crops.  But first, let’s revisit a time long ago when almost the exact same conditions as we have experienced for the last 5 months—unseasonably cool, wet, and overcast days—continued nonstop for 5 years and led to the Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.

Records show that northern Europe was battered by persistently gloomy springs, summers and autumns interrupted only by the typical dark winters.  This weather—of which we’ve received a 5-month dose—so favored late blight that all but a fraction of Ireland’s potato crop was devastated for several consecutive years.  It is hardly known that the rest of Europe and the United States suffered from potato losses only slightly less devastating than those that occurred in Ireland.  The tragic difference was that these other parts of Europe and the United States had a more diverse food crop base than did Ireland, where over a million people starved and from which several million emigrated over the subsequent decade.

Even lesser known is the surprising fact that, contrary to conventional wisdom, in the 1840s there were nearly two dozen distinct potato cultivars grown throughout Ireland and over fifty in the rest of Europe.  Far from the popular image of a “monoculture”, potatoes grown in Ireland included a diverse group of white, yellow, pink, brown and red skinned varieties. These had been collected both in the wild and from native markets in South America and deposited in the botanical gardens of Europe over 300 years before the famine.  While it is certainly true that many of these various cultivars existed within a “type” of all-purpose boiling and mashing potato, it’s also true that, out of this quite diverse gene pool, post-famine “survivors” appeared.  These became the ancestors of new and resistant potato cultivars grown to this very day.*

Therefore, the first lesson to be learned from the near collapse of so many fields of tomatoes on farms and in home gardens dotted across the northeastern United States, is that no normal diversity of cultivars or genetic variation can resist an aggressive, virulent strain of the late blight organism under conditions that nurture its explosive growth and dispersal.

However, there is a second lesson that is of—literally—great value.  Modern hybrid tomatoes—carefully and deliberately developed over many years—possess sufficient vigor to withstand all sorts of diseases, including a particularly destructive and widespread attack of late blight.

This is vividly demonstrated in the high survival rates of hybrid tomatoes throughout the hardest hit growing regions.  In our trial gardens at Fordhook Farm, we see rows of old-fashioned heirlooms and open-pollinated market varieties of tomatoes lying in heaps of wilted foliage and diseased fruit, and—just a few feet away—rows of healthy hybrid plants loaded with heavy, flawless fruit.

As the name implies, late blight generally occurs later in the season.  It has never occurred this early nor been so widespread in the United States; last year there were only a few reported incidences of the disease.  The same varieties of tomato have been grown in the Northeast for years, and the various stains of the disease-causing organism have likewise been present for years.  However, our recent, freakishly unseasonable weather has been ideal for the growth of the organism and the spread of the disease. 

If the spring and summer of 2009 is followed in succession by similar seasons in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, we could face a complete extinction of many—not all—of the old-fashioned heirlooms and open-pollinated tomato varieties that folks in the Northeast have come to enjoy since those varieties were reintroduced in the early 1980s.  However, just as there were survivors among the potato varieties that succumbed during the years of the great famine and which gave rise to the modern, resistant potatoes of today, so the hybrid tomatoes of the 20th century as well as those of the early 21st century will be the saving grace of tomato lovers everywhere.  We might even discover utterly new sources of resistance, although that will probably come from wild, weedy relatives of tomato and potato.  It’s the silver lining of, quite literally, a very dark storm cloud.

Media stories about the monolithic food industry, Big Agriculture, “bioengineering”, and “industrial farms” ill inform us of the virtues of modern agriculture and obscure the role of plant breeding as a science and discipline.  Plant breeders who work in productive crops such as wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, and the wide range of vegetables and fruits upon which the world depends, struggle toward their various goals with many positive purposes in mind.  One of the most important of these is disease resistance.

Plant breeding is ancient.  In its essence, it was probably practiced before agriculture was widespread.  Early nomadic people may have saved seed that was larger or that was easily separated from unwanted parts, carried it with them, and planted it far from its source.  In this way, they honed plant characteristics that were useful to them.

Plant breeding has its formal roots in the work of the humble Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, who with the common pea first demonstrated predictable patterns in the transmission of genetic traits.  Since Mendel, plant breeding has progressed to the point that scientists are able to breed food crops that can thrive in salty water and deep shade and withstand a host of pests while, at the same time, yield abundant and delicious produce.  It has been due to the skill of the plant breeder that plants have been selected and hybridized so that they require less water, less space, less fertilizer, and less protective chemicals.  This is the height of human discernment.

Society should cherish the human ability to select different traits from various plant populations and mix them together, just as Nature would under ideal circumstances.  Call plant breeders the “nuclear physicists” of the biology world.

 
* To elaborate, let’s take Ireland in the 1840s.  In a nation smaller than the state of Maine, the Irish had raised potatoes for at least 125 years.  Within the two-dozen distinct or unique varieties, there was a wide variation due to the separate and diverse genetic background of each cultivar.  They differed in tuber size, tuber shape, size of yield, time of yield, quality of tuber (wet or dry), color of skin, color of flesh, thickness of skin, ability to tolerate bad soils (hard or low in nutrients, etc.) and ability to remain viable in long periods of storage.

Dizzy yet?

More interesting to my point is that they differed also in resistance to heat, to cold and to frost.  Plus, they varied in resistance to a virus called “Leaf Curl”, as well as to a tendency of tubers to develop warts, and—most important—to fungi and molds.  This last genetic variability proved decisive in providing the post-famine Irish with new varieties—based partly on the surviving potatoes—that would replace those that lacked the strength to fight off late blight, a phenomenally destructive plant disease caused by a water mold or more technically an Oomycete.

So, an interesting question might be:  Do today’s potato farmers of Maine—an area substantially greater than the size of Ireland—grow 22 distinct cultivars?  For those of you in the south, Ireland would fit comfortably in South Carolina.  For midwesterners and westerners, two “Irelands” would fit in Wisconsin, and three would fit in Oregon—with Connecticut tossed in.  Rather than the Irish farmer in the 1840s, could it be the contemporary potato farmer who best exemplifies a “dependency” on a handful of cultivars? 

Thanks to the noted historian Redcliffe Salaman, here is a list of the “top ten” varieties of the nearly two-dozen potatoes grown in tiny Ireland in 1839:

1. Champion aka Congo aka The Cup:  a red skinned, cream fleshed, early to mid season, medium sized tuber; extremely popular due to its flavor and nutrition.  A bit hard to digest, so it was mainly sold to people in towns and cities where it got above average prices.  (A much later progeny of Champion, “Flourball”, proved easier to digest, as well as blight resistant.)

2. Howard aka Cluster aka The Turk:  White skinned and white fleshed, great in poor soils, forming medium sized tubers on short stolons in tight clusters.  It was very popular with rural people and the poor.  It was early to mid season and turned out to be somewhat resistant to blight, i.e., not all plants succumbed, and many were entirely resistant.

3. Irish Apple Red:  Red skinned, late and also somewhat long-keeping in storage.  Very dry tubers rather than wet—perfect for both boiling and mashing to which milk could be added.  Extremely popular and well liked, due to tuber quality and storage, but also because it produced crops in the mid July to late August period when most other varieties of its kind did not.  Susceptible to fungal diseases and very hard hit by late blight during the famine, it has virtually disappeared from cultivation.

4. Irish Apple White:  White skinned version of #3.

5. Kerr’s Pink aka White Kidney:  Very early, small to medium sized tubers with pink skin and white flesh.  Could be double-cropped in some areas.  Good tuber quality for all-around purposes.  Some but not good blight resistance.

6. Lumper aka Leinster Wonder:  Extremely productive, versatile variety that was, therefore, popular with the poor.  White skinned and white fleshed tubers of medium size and poor to average quality.  Early to mid to late season.  Minimal resistance to blight.  Legendary in famine history due to popularity with poor, who comprised nearly all the starvation dead.

7. The Manly:  Medium to large tubers with white flesh and brownish tan skin.  Extremely productive main or mid season variety that would produce record weight harvests.  Average tuber quality, but was popular due to high yields.

8. The Noble Ox:  Very large tubers that some described as “ugly”, some were also misshaped.  Dark brown to almost “black” skin and white flesh, very productive with continuous yields mid to late season.  Virus resistance and some blight resistance recorded.  Used for both human and dairy cow consumption.

9. The Yam aka Surinam:  Red skinned with red streaked flesh.  Variable sized from medium to large.  Was considered very flavorful and attractive, sold well in towns and cities, less in rural areas.

10. The Lapstone Kidney:  White skin and tuber, “mid early” which was popular due both to its niche harvest time, and to its outstanding ability to keep well for almost a year in storage.  Also, it was medium to higher yielding with high quality, long, medium-sized tubers.

Remember:  the potato farmers of Ireland grew more than twice this number of diverse cultivars—hardly the “monoculture” characterized in recent popular history.  In fact, they turned out to be the single most influential group of farmers in modern history.  It was the tragedy of the Great Potato Famine that spurred worldwide interest in plant genetics and led, indirectly, to the popularization of not only Mendel, but also Darwin.