I was lugging the garbage out to the curb tonight (8 bags and that’s a light week for us) and thinking how mildly horrified I am by the amount of garbage we produce at my house, and also thinking that the only job I loathe more than dealing with garbage is going to the grocery store.
I keep a running list for the grocery store. We go about once a week, sometimes once every 10 days. It costs us about $125 per week, including all the household supplies, paper goods, etc. After putting it off as many days as possible, there comes a morning when everyone woke up before 9 a.m., and we manage to get breakfast eaten and all dressed before the 2 y/o starts wanting a mid-morning snack, and off we go to My Most Despised Event of the Week. Ugh.
The grocery store here plays particularly depressing music - like the worst music of each decade. The cart gets fuller and I start cringeing, knowing that any second the 2 y/o will want me to hold her instead of riding in the seat. So then I am holding her on one hip and pulling the full cart behind me. The 5 y/o is pretty cool about the whole thing and, while she doesn’t really help, she doesn’t hinder the operation. Which is nice.
I couldn’t really say why I hate the whole ordeal so much, except that it seems that for that hour and 20 minutes it usually takes, I fall into a sludgy pit I have to trudge through, pulling an ever-heavier cart, while the music worsens by the song. Then there’s the whole loading of the car, the getting the girls into the car, the coming home and trying to figure out whether to unload the car first and leave the girls in the car (we live on a busy street so can’t just let them wander in the front yard while I unload) or get the girls in the house and then unload the car while wondering if they are constructing a bomb in the sunroom while unattended.
My point, you ask? It’s this: if this whole experiment in increasing production at home and decreasing consumerism does nothing else but reduce the frequency and duration of shopping trips (and of garbage - see- my points tie together so prettily) then I will have succeeded.
And so tonight, after supper, when I realized we needed to finish setting up the third square-foot-garden plot for planting (www.squarefootgardening.com) and needed to run the soaker hoses to the two existing plots, and generally do a bunch of heavy lifting of dirt and dirtying of my hands, I felt my lazy gene start to kick in.
But we got out, and we worked, and the girls had fun. There was one moment where I looked over and all three other members of my little family were raking the bed, and I wanted to capture that moment forever in my heart. And it got me thinking that working in the garden, preparing it to provide food for us all summer, is infinitely better work than going to the grocery store.
By gardening instead of consumer-ing, we have all but eliminated food miles on any food we can grow ourselves. (We’ll quibble over the food miles for the seedlings, garden hoses, and soil later -baby steps). We aren’t driving my gas guzzler to the store so we’re saving gas. There will be no packaging on the food from our garden other than the packaging God gave those veggies. And it’s an activity that we truly can all work on together. It felt like work to me, but it sure didn’t feel like the kind of work that grocery shopping is. It looked like play as far as the girls were concerned. That was an hour outside, sharing a project with their parents, where they could get dirty and feel productive and examine tiny green tomatoes.
I love that they will at least know where their vegetables come from this summer. I hope that even if they don’t ever materially participate in this gardening thing, they will at least grow up thinking it is what people do.
I also know this. I get overwhelmed by too many choices in the fridge, and then I get paralyzed about what to cook for supper. Too many options. An overabundance, as usual. But if what we have that day are some fresh tomatoes and squash from the garden, then we will have cornbread and tomatoes and squash, and maybe some beans once I get into the routine of cooking a pot of pintos or red beans once a week.
So I am pinning a lot on this garden and what it will do for our family. Beyond feeding us, I hope it will change my labor from slogging through the grocery store to working outside in the fresh air & sunshine. It will give us more time each day away from electronic media. It will give us a family project.
I think the garden may be the key to the whole thing. I think my cottage starts with a garden.
If you are a gardening enthusiast or a grocery store despiser, do share.
L
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