Planting a seed - In Your Own Words

Natural Health, April, 2002

A Perfect Tomato

As a child, I had little patience for the way my immigrant mother kept the windowsills of our New York City apartment overflowing with potted plants. I saw it as a futile attempt to recreate the garden of her youth in Puerto Rico. Many years later, when my husband and I bought a house in New Jersey, we asked my mother to come live with us. She soon took charge of the garden, and our 2-year-old daughter became her apprentice. Now, three years later, our daughter knows not only the names of all the plants but also how much water to feed the seedlings and when a tomato is perfectly ripened. When I come home from work on summer evenings, I always find them working in the soil, side by side in their wide-brimmed hats. The gardening passion may have skipped me, but my mother made sure she planted that seed in my daughter.

Nancy Sotomayor-Gonzalez Freehold, N.J.

Heirloom Varieties

Two experienced and emotionally drained city chefs, my husband and I eagerly answered an ad for two chefs to work on an organic-biodynamic farm in Australia. Although we'd never worked in a garden before, we quickly learned to grow fruits and vegetables, mostly heirloom varieties that we'd never tasted. Now, after only a year, we look forward to gardening and to transforming all the time and effort we spend there into delicious gourmet meals. We live off the land like our ancestors once did. And we've never been happier.

M. Sarazin French Island, Victoria Australia

The Weed Pickers

My sister and I grew up on a small farm in northern New Mexico. Our parents always planted a large garden of really good vegetables. My sister and I liked to eat the vegetables but we dreaded the planting because we were the weeders. It seemed like it took forever to weed that garden, and when we were done, we would have to start all over again. Now it's 20 years later and I can't wait for spring so I can put some seeds in the ground in my own small garden and watch them grow. It seems strange that I spent all that time as a child complaining about having a garden, and now that I'm grown up, I can hardly wait until it's time to weed.

Kathy Brubaker McIntosh, Minn.