It wasn't many years after we moved from that special house with the BIG veggie garden plots that soon I was on my own in the world. I had graduated college and was working for the summer in the Midwest. Then from there I moved to AZ and lived on an Indian reservation working as a mission worker. I lived with other single teachers on the school grounds, and we had the desert as our backyard, nestled on the valley floor between two mesas.
The backyard desert beckoned me to get my fingernails dirty. SOOOO...I learned how to garden like my friends and neighbors whose land I lived on. They had been tilling this sand for a good thousand years or so and were struggling to eek out a living....so I tried too. Growing a garden in the desert is MUCH different than growing one back East. The semi-aridness, and the sand called for a change of planting depths, and other changes in gardening. So I acquired some seeds and tried. And though the winds mixed with the sand blew hard that spring, and many of my seeds never took root, some did. I grew corn!! Corn in the Desert is SOOOOO different than corn in PA. But I grew it! With advice from the locals, I had such a small harvest, but a harvest I did!! I was excited. I came to have a much different appreciation for the local people once I planted my first seed, and struggled all summer for a crop. I only planted a couple of hills of corn, but it grew!
And I learned a LOT.There's something about being in a different culture and learning to grow their way.
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1 comment:
Thanks for sharing, enjoying these posts.
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