When I was growing up in New York City, fed on TV dinners and sugary cereal, I never gave a thought to how food was produced. In my neighborhood, there was one teeny health-food store that carried pockmarked, shriveled apples and a couple of limp carrots.
Then I went to California for college, as did my husband (we met in high school), and we took a year off before grad school. To earn tuition money, we stumbled on an opportunity to live on a little raspberry farm and do repairs in exchange for rent. We had no farming experience. The guy who lived there previously gave us a crash course in how to care for raspberries. He showed us the chemical shed and pointed out the dormant spray and fertilizer and how to put it into the drip line. But when it came time to start applying the chemicals, we had a very instinctive reaction. This was a time when most people didn’t know what “organic” meant, but when you’re the person who’s going to handle chemicals, breathe them, apply them to your farm, then eat food grown with them and sell it to people who come to your farm stand, you realize, “These chemicals actually kill pests and weeds.” That was our wake-up call.
At the local nursery we got Rodale’s Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and got hooked into the world of what many people considered “hippie farming.” Eventually we moved on from raspberries and found something else we could grow efficiently on a small farm: baby lettuces. That was our first big success, and the turning point in our company.
Since we started back in 1984, so much information on the problems of conventionally produced food has shown that our intuition was right. Though organic is more expensive to farm, it’s a better value when you account for the effect on the environment and on health.
Later, when we were farming more land and had our children, we started to garden at home again. I have the cutest video of my little boy when he was two and my daughter was five, with their shovels and gloves, where you can hear my son with his two-year-old lispy voice talking about all the different things that we were planting that year.
Now my kids are teenagers and they’re both smart eaters. They understand better than most of their peers how their food is grown, what’s in season and why it tastes better, how the changing weather affects the farm. I believe you should make educating your kids about food a priority, like teaching them good hygiene and street safety. I see the awakening all the time in school groups that come through. Kids on our tours will pick some fresh English peas, open them and eat them, and all of a sudden peas are their favorite vegetable. Same thing with a really ripe cantaloupe or apple.
The nature in your own little backyard garden is full of miracles. There’s the miracle of planting a seed and watering it and watching it grow, and then there’s the sadness when it gets eaten by snails or a gopher. For kids, it’s so fun and healthy to go outside and weed versus sitting in front of the TV. Or to see if the string beans are ready and pick them for dinner (even if your string beans are growing in a pot on your fire escape). Gardening gets kids in touch with nature, gets them using their bodies, gets them excited about trying new things and eating healthy fresh food. In a supermarket, you see very few varieties of produce: a few different apples, one type of carrot. When you garden you can get a seed catalog and see how there aren’t just orange carrots, but yellow carrots and white ones. Look at how many kinds of tomatoes there are, how some have to be trellised and some are bushes.
For kids the most exciting thing is pulling things out of the earth. Radishes are the quickest gratification; carrots take a little longer, but everyone falls in love with them. Potatoes are the most exciting of all! Harvesting potatoes is like an Easter egg hunt. You loosen the soil so they can dig their hands around and find all shapes and sizes like buried treasure. If kids’ first experiences with food are so amazing, they’re going to love to eat fresh produce, then there’s no more powerful way to do it than by growing it in or around your house. You realize how long it takes to pick a pound of string beans and to grow it, and all the challenges of keeping it watered and fertilized and pest-free. You have more of an appreciation of your food — and your planet.
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