My Gardening Career Started In Grade School

Bob Bauer

January 23, 2017 (Last Updated: March 06, 2023) | Reading Time: 1 minutes

January 23, 2017

My gardening career started in grade school mowing bermuda grass with a push mower. Man I hated that. By high school I had moved up to weeding flower beds. Way more my style. I didn't really get to trim bushes until I had my own. I guess people thought I might topiary subliminal messages in them..

They might have been right, I was a bit mischievous back then. Age has mellowed me, not like fine wine, but more like flat ginger ale . The garden is my playground and plants are my experiments. I sit really well now too..

January 24, 2017

I read that a group of well intended agronomists planned to improve the living standards of a tribal third world village by introducing a strain of corn that was more nutritious than the crops that they were growing. They cleared out their gardens and planted the non indigenous crops. All went well until a drought wiped out their food and they had to eat the indigenous "weeds" that had been thrown outside the garden to make way for the new improved crops. I don't know if it's a true story or not but it stuck with me because it seems that as the apex species on this planet we have become arrogant about our understanding of nature..

Humility is in order. We are vastly insignificant to times onward movement..

January 25, 2017

Soil science is an incredibly complex subject. I love Mother Earth so I thought I would bone up on the ecosystems of the ground. I logged onto a state university extension site and was soon overwhelmed with all the names of all the critters. I felt like a med student trying to memorize everything in Gray's Anatomy..

All those words were not going to make me any smarter or increase my appreciation of gardening so I quit. Then I stumbled across a book on microbes that was presented in layman's terms and I absorbed it in one read through. Our soils are a vast battleground of competing bacteria and fungus and are way busier than what appears to the naked eye..

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