The Gardener and the Market: How Radishes Started Civilization, Or Something

            For out-of-town readers (if I’ve got any):  The Trenton Ingle’s Market was damaged in the April 27 tornados that ravaged our area.  Rumors abound about why it has still not reopened – it rents the space from Soloff, a big shopping-center realty concern, and Soloff ain’t sayin’ either.  But its absence is driving everybody in town nuts.  Or at least your narrator.  One of the only two competitors costs too much, and I’m still mad at them about a chocolate chip cookie in 2009; and the other prominently features preformed yam patties in the meat section.  I ask you.

The Gardener and the Market:  How Radishes Started Civilization, or Something

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You hear a lot of nonsense about how it all began.

Religious people will tell you that everything was made fresh and clean in a matter of days, and scientific ones will bend your ear about fish slowly growing legs and monkeys developing thumbs, leading to an increased ability to manipulate tools and, ultimately, beer cans. 

I’ll tell you what it really was:  It was radishes.

I know this because my neighbors grew radishes one year and gave me a bushel.  I thought it was nice of them at the time but radish by radish I realized it had been an act of desperation. 

See, tomatoes you can can and green beans you can freeze, but the only thing you can do with radishes is eat them until your insides commence to combust spontaneously.  That pleasant peppery little zip they have turns on you after the first dozen or so, blows you up like swamp gas and makes it feel like you are practicing for Hell.

            And then there’s lettuce. 

Lettuce is even more perishable in the garden than it is in the crisper, so during the growing season it’s hard to walk down the road without some hollow-eyed gardener body-slamming you and begging you to take some before it goes to seed.  They call that process  “bolting,” which I find apt because most of your trouble growing lettuce is chasing down people to eat it.

            And what of zucchini?

Zucchini is a vegetable that takes over whole neighborhoods, proliferating furtively beneath its spreading foliage and militantly resisting any effort to control its throbbing Italian fecundity.  Gardeners pushing zucchini tend to be needier even than your radish crowd.

What, then, could be more natural than that these overburdened growers should come together for the mutual good?  That they should develop a system of exchange to ease surfeits and supply deficits?  That someone should take advantage of the crowd and sell hot dogs? 

Thus it was, at the dewy dawn of time, that gardeners unwittingly created the concept of the Market, and thence civilization.

I have mixed feelings about that. 

See, the thing got out of control.  We started turning everything from food to finer feelings into a market commodity.  Hungry?  Buy a burger.  Feel bad?  Buy some pills.  In love?  Buy a ring.  When I was young (she said coyly), that was not the effect that followed that cause. 

            I have a friend who instead of antiperspirant uses a salt stick she gets at a health food store.  The light film of minerals allows you to sweat but mitigates the odor.  My friend uses it because she worries that antiperspirants contribute to breast cancer.

            I wasn’t sure I believed that – what’s the FDA for if not to protect us from products that kill us? – but I decided to err on the side of caution and bought a salt stick myself. 

Then recently I realized I’d had the same one over a year and not much of it was used up yet.  The part that’s gone is mostly through attrition, which is to say dropping it on the bathroom floor.  So it may be around to pass on to my heirs.

            And thinking that, I found myself suddenly believing my friend’s theory.  The Market works best with commodities you use once and throw away, like toilet paper.  What would happen to America if people bought deodorant only once in a lifetime? 

So tumors schmumors, antiperspirant, and the Market, must roll on!   And if you don’t believe FDA allows products that kill people, just look at the diseases that processed food has visited on America’s children.

This past year has been my annus horribilis – that means “horrible year,” by the way, and is not a lead-in to anything else I have to say about toilet paper – but if no other good has come of it, it has showed how little gardens need have with the Market.   

As I dogpaddled morosely around my sea of troubles this spring, basil volunteered from  self-seeding, parsley and sage from roots.  Potato plants sprang from spuds I’d missed harvesting last year.  Eating-size asparagus grew up beside the porch steps and down by the mailbox, ostensibly through spontaneous generation. 

And flowers?  Cleome appeared magically in a spot where I’d grown it several years ago, and in the front border petunias were blooming before I’d quite realized they were even capable of self-seeding.  These are simpler blossoms than the big flashy doubles I had there last year but the colors are beautiful and I love them.    

So when my horticultural fervor finally kicked back in, it was simply a matter of rolling around in the dirt liberating the plants from weeds, neatly illustrating the one overriding message of Bob’s Little Acre:  Gardening is something you do, not something you buy.  

Yes, when I moved here from the big city many years ago, I did so with the idea of escaping the Market.  I wanted to twine flowers in my hair and grow all my own food. 

But when you live at the anal end of nowhere, and work at home, it’s not long before you figure out that the Ingle’s is 75 percent of your social life, and anyway you can’t grow toilet paper.

Which brings us, at last, to the point of this column:  WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITHOUT INGLE’S?  EVERYTHING I NEED, ONE OF THE OTHER GROCERY STORES CHARGES DOUBLE FOR AND THE OTHER DOESN’T CARRY!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!  SHRIEK!

Ahem.  What I meant to say was, as a nation we must wean ourselves from our pernicious dependency on the Market, in favor of the steely self-reliance of our frontier forefathers.

And above all, we must not plant radishes.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.