March –a time to think about spring after this long, cruel winter, and a time to dream ahead to gardens.

I was reading an article recently where they said that in response to the increasing cost of food, ($800/yr more for a family of four in the last year) a greater number of people are growing their own food. Even with so many people living in the city with less land, a friend of mine gets land in a community garden where he grows food for him and his wife (his kids are grown and on their own).

A 2022 national survey found that just over half of respondents were growing fruits and vegetable at home  – nearly one in five started during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interesting, but I suspect the amount of food they grow is a fraction of what my parents did when I was growing up on a farm north of Lucknow in the 1950s. We have an aerial photograph taken of our farm in the 1950s. Look carefully at it and you can see my grandmother, my brother and me walking back to the house from our huge garden when the photographer snapped the picture.

That farm is almost unrecognizable today, having been bought from my parents by my sister and her husband, then sold to an Old Order Mennonite family when my brother-in-law suffered a terminal illness. The new owners had such a big family they built onto the house in a way that makes our original house look like a small addition.

The barn I was used to as a child blew down while my sister and her husband owned the farm. My brother-in-law built a new barn, all on one floor with most of the work done with his tractor. He was bewildered when the Mennonite family built a new barn, similar to the original barn, on two floors. Again, his barn looked like as a small addition. He didn’t understand that for Mennonites, gravity from the upstairs mows to the downstairs stables, was an important factor before/without tractor power.
But back to gardens. women in that earlier era seldom worked off the farm. They contributed to the family’s existence through saving money by growing and preserving food. In those days before freezers, most of the food was preserved in sealers. I remember jars and jars of cherries, tomatoes and strawberries on shelves in our basement.

When that aerial photograph was taken, my grandmother, my brother and I were returning from the huge strawberry patch we grew back then. We also had black and red currants, gooseberries and a raspberry patch where I remember being stung by bees from a wild beehive.

In the background, one can see apple trees in our family’s orchard where we picked apples for apple sauce, also preserved.
As a result, I imagine our food purchases at the local grocery store, were far smaller than they are today. I remember, too, that we butchered our own pigs and cattle which were kept frozen in a local “locker” which we rented.

But over the years, as more women worked, we changed our rural food habits to be more like urbanites. Stores where you could buy anything, like Loblaws (or, locally, Zehrs) and Walmart, grew to replace local supermarkets.

When we moved to the country 50 years ago, we had a huge garden. Little by little, as we aged, the garden got smaller to the point I plant very little these days.

Given all these changes, it’s interesting that so many of us – over half– are growing our own food. While this may be for practical reasons, I suspect that a side issue might be that people may understand the issues farmers face: insects, diseases, etc. 

This is an exceedingly important development. We all, including urbanites, need to know more about the work it takes to grow food so that we have greater respect those who feed us. ◊