Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
7.
GROUNDWORK FOR SUCCESS
Teaching New Gardeners
The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.
—Gertrude Jekyll
Not knowing how to grow food might seem like a modern problem. Surely in the old days everyone knew
how to grow their own food, right? I used to think this way, too, until I discovered that during World
War II, 90 percent of the victory gardeners in Chicago had never grown anything. Zip. Nada. During the
war, the city had quite a task at hand to teach food gardening to the army of food gardeners springing up
overnight, needing to feed their families. And they did it very well—Chicago led the nation in the World
War II victory garden movement, with 1,500 community gardens, more than 250,000 home gardens, and
the largest victory garden in the United States.
Learning how to garden has not changed that much since victory gardeners met the challenge of
learning to grow their own food all those years ago. According to a recent Garden Writers of America
survey, friends, neighbors, or family members sharing their knowledge and skills is still the best way to
learn gardening; the second most popular way is finding help and instruction through topics or Internet
research. Thankfully, there are many books, websites, and experts out there available to help. And the
very cool thing about community gardens is that the learning is exponential. One person teaches another,
and that person teaches his or her neighbors, passing along the knowledge and skills very quickly.
A challenge you may encounter when teaching in your garden is handling the many opinions on the
so-called right way to garden. If you have a lot of gardeners, you may have a lot of opinions. Developing
a culture of respectful sharing is essential and mutually beneficial, with everyone encouraged to voice
their opinions, questions, and styles. This way people will feel free to experiment, determining on their
own what works best for them.
Opinions aside, there are some basic gardening principles that most people can't argue about. We will
stick to those absolute fundamentals in this section so you can get your new food gardeners off to a good
start. The rest of the learning comes through observation and doing, which will happen as your first sea-
son progresses and, hopefully, for years to come.
GARDEN THERAPY
I should get a tattoo of these comments, because this is what I say over and over to new gardeners at the
start of every season:
