Dumbing Down the US

No, not me. I'm retired, but still tap at the keyboard every day.  

I hired a kid, maybe 25 or so, to do the heavy work in the garden. I wanted him to do the bed prep and to set up the soaker hoses and then mulch the veggies I had already planted in another bed.

He had never seen a tomato plant before. For that matter, he had never seen a veggie garden before.  I asked him to snake the soaker hoses near the stem of the tomato plants.  After he did not move, I realized he had no idea what I was talking about. He did not know what the plant was, what a stem was or why he was doing what he was doing. 

Aha, sez me, a teaching moment says the old teacher in me.  I explained what we were doing and why. Showed him the baby bean plants because the seeds had come up.

Showed him why we plant bean seeds a couple of weeks apart because I don't want all those beans at once, so we plant them in stages. I explained that the tomatoes would grow and yield nice red tomatoes, the likes of which could never be found in a supermarket. 

Not only did he not know what a veggie garden is, I found out he didn't care. 

He had no curiosity whatsoever.  I asked him to bring me a bag of fertilizer from several feet away.  

He brought two bags to me, the only two nearby. One was lime, the other fertilizer.  The bag had FERTILIZER written on the side.  He either couldn't read or had no idea what fertilizer was.  None.  I finished the placing of the soakers, the mulching, the fertilizing while he watched and then I sent him home.

And we wonder why young folks are unemployed.  I sure know the answer for this particular young man. Not that this couldn't happen with older ones, but it seems to be epidemic with youngsters.

What happened to his natural curiosity, that wide eyed discovery and learning process that every baby is born with?  Did the schools pound it out of him with their regimentation? Did his parents not care?  Why is this happening everywhere?

And with the way the schools and jobs are being dumbed down to suit the new work force, do we care?  Guess the politicians care because an uneducated populace is easier to control.

Gardeners Will Garden

 Gardeners will garden. No matter where we live, whether it is in drought-stricken states like California or rain forest states like Oregon or Washington, we will grow vegetables or flowers. 

We garden in containers, in raised beds, hydroponically, in greenhouses. no matter what we have to do, we WILL garden.

Here on Dodd Mountain in rural Arkansas, we have stone instead of soil. If  you scrape your foot on the ground, you will hit stone, not soil. So we have to make our own soil. We compost everything there is to compost. We never burn the leaves here. We put them in the compost heap. Often we just direct compost putting the leaves in plant beds using it as mulch over the winter.

After the road grader goes by on our dirt road, we harvest what it leaves behind and incorporate the clay into the compost.  Really, we do. We shovel the clay into a wheelbarrow and walk it up the driveway to the compost heap or sometimes into the garden itself. It can fill holes in a raised bed.  Actually, I don’t do that. I hire a strong young man to do it. 

We even have a deal with the electric company tree trimmers to dump their chipper/shredders in our yard so we can spread all that lovely mulch over the stone our house is built on. With time and patience, we may be able to harvest more than just the pine needles and acorns that fall every year. 

Gardening is not cheap here in Stone County. I garden in raised beds here using straw bales between logs from felled trees nearby. That took heavy machines to cut the trees, trim them into logs and put them in place. Straw bales are not cheap either. And the raised beds make it easy for me on my scooter to plant, weed and harvest. If they were not raised, I would not be able to garden.

You can see that perhaps buying produce at the grocery store might even be cheaper than gardening. But is any grocery store tomato anywhere near as good as the ones you harvest from your own garden?

Assorted peppers, green tomatoes for frying, cherry tomatoes for snacks while picking other veggies

English peas ready to be picked and shelled. Remember doing that with your grandmother sitting on the back porch?

In My Own Backyard

My scooter sits right outside the back door in a little cubby built just for it. The cubby has a roof to keep it dry and an electric outlet to plug it in at night. 

All I have to do is get to the back door, into the seat of the scooter, back up, then drive down the ramp and travel the paths of our 6 acres. Granted I can’t get up and down the ravine to the creek, but I am so happy with my at home travels. We are in the process of building a switchback so I can get to the creek, but that's slow going, as you can imagine. 

Can’t get up this grade, but that’s OK.

The deck you see has a ramp up to it and down the other side. The back door is where the scooter lives during the night and when it’s raining.

I can get to the veggie gardens

I garden in raised beds. These are straw bales when they were installed in February.  Now they are filled with tomatoes, peppers, okra and green beans. 

I also have a flower garden that I can see directly from the living room.  Donna loves  gardening as much as I do. She is in charge of the flower gardens.

So, you can see that we who are mobility ‘challenged’ live our lives just about like you do.  Sure we are not over four feet tall, but we travel fast and are not all that disadvantaged.