Toughsledding

Recently, I received a garden catalog that made gardening look like nothing more than another expensive hobby rooted in the petrochemical industry.
The company sold plastic raised bed panels, plastic trowels, plastic fencing, plastic greenhouses and cold frames, plastic harvest baskets, plastic rain boots, plastic aprons, plastic lawn furniture, plastic garden sheds, plastic stakes and trellises, plastic lawn and garden ornaments, etc., etc.
The gardens in the catalog’s photographs didn’t look real. From the looks of all that white and wood-colored plastic edging, I half expect those “perfect” vegetables and flowers to be plastic too, along with the rather plastic smile on the models holding the plastic trowels.
Now I don’t consider myself a completely unreasonable, purist Luddite; I don’t disdain everything about the modern world and advocate a return to cave man status, but I found this list of catalog products disheartening. The only plastic items I use in my garden are hoses and waterproof trays for starting plants indoors.
My trellises and bean poles are wood and in many cases are hand-fashioned from tree and willow shoots found on my own property or picked up on a recycling venture through the city’s alleys or country roads. My stakes are bamboo, obviously imported from a warmer climate, and my pots are ceramic (i.e. natural clay), or recycled plastic from having purchased greenhouse plants.
Gardening in the green world is about reaping the benefits of nature, albeit in a more controlled habitat than nature herself allows. Even so, the conscientious gardener must work WITH her in order to reap success. Mother Nature doesn’t care much for plastic. She rejects it when buried in her soil; the stuff simply isn’t biodegradable as are wood, leaves, even iron as it oxidizes.
I know I can’t, or maybe won’t, go completely “natural.”
I recognize that few, if any, of the vegetables we grow here in Idaho are derived from local native species, but by planting heirloom seeds and even some hybrids (seeds developed by “natural” genetic means as opposed to genetic manipulation) the conscientious gardener achieves healthy food. Gardeners manipulate soil structure and water quantity within the confines of his/her particular climate to get the maximum nutritional, taste and aesthetic value from homegrown food.
And such results have been achieved for century upon century without the “help” of petrochemicals, i.e. plastic.
Gardening for nutrition and taste are true luxuries in this mad agribusiness world. Agriculturalists (I can hardly call them farmers these days) practice various forms of monoculture and choose their singular crops based on quantity of yield and the ability to withstand machine harvesting and cross-country shipping. They want their products to look uniformly pleasant and blemish-free, while taste and nutrition are beside the point.
And I haven’t even begun to mention the amount of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides that monoculture requires to prevent crop failure at such a scale.
A home gardener has the luxury of growing a variety of foods in such a way as to minimize damage from insects and other biological means. A gardener can produce a truly delicious tomato, one that may have developed a bumpy lobe (making it unsalable), but when eaten is heavenly. A whole basket of homegrown tomatoes may be anything but uniform except in the uniformly delicious category.
When it comes to aesthetics, those white plastic fence-lets and trellises are not pleasing to my eye. I much prefer rough, curvy sticks straight from the woods for my morning glories and peas to climb.
Plastic may have its uses, but as its popularity and apparent disposability takes over jobs previously held by other substances, it’s created yet another human American dependency on the petrochemical industry.
How many young people know how to keep food fresh in a refrigerator without plastic wrap or Glad® containers? How was bread kept from drying out before plastic bags?
Does anybody remember refillable fountain pens? Or a not-so-long-ago era when “plastic” meant inferior, a cheap replacement for genuine goods?
Should we be thinking about this?