Avant Gardener: The competetive nature of the gardener

  • By Kyle Valentini
  • August 27, 2012
  • 398
                        
Summary: Gardeners compete like athletes but they all on the same team and famous sports columnists don’t write about them. I’ll have to be honest. I am no sports fan. Other than watching my own child participate in school-sponsored sports like cross country and softball I have zero experience with what seems to be a national pastime. I don’t watch sports on television. I don’t listen to sports on the radio. I have never attended a college or pro sporting event. Wait, I did see the Kansas City Royals play the Houston Astros in Kansas City in1983 but it left no lasting impression other than I am still not certain if I was in Missouri or Kansas at the time. I am unlike most people and simply find no pleasure in the artificial purposefulness that temporarily strikes sports lovers when they are cheering on their favorite teams as they compete in a rule-based game that is making someone famous, rich or getting them into a school that will make them famous or rich. Gardeners do compete and in some cases the cut-throat attitude of the hoe-wielding, bib-wearing, pruner-sharpening competitor can be as fierce and passionate as the rivalries seen in college and professional sports. The difference is the lack of big-name sponsors, fans and Frank Deford writing a commentary about it. Ask any giant pumpkin grower if he is competitive and he’ll tell you about how he trimmed away every last blossom until he was left with just one fragile flower that would become the 687 pound cucurbit winner at the Anytown, USA Fair last September. He’ll tell you how he watered it, fertilized it, sang bluegrass songs to it all the while knowing that the guy down the street was doing the same thing and there was no way he was going to let him take home that blue ribbon. No way. Sure, gardeners are competitive. Ask the pepper grower if she hasn’t been cultivating a variety of the nightshade plants with the hopes of growing the hottest pepper possible, a pepper so hot even her brother-in-law wouldn’t be able to eat it without beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead and tears streaming down his face. Some gardeners are more competitive than others. We all want a weed-free garden but very few of us have one. We all want perfectly shaped tomatoes but most of us find they are shaped unlike the perfectly tasteless variety found in the supermarkets and usually come with cracks from too much heat. I doubt there is a Gardeners’ Hall of Fame but if there was it would include the giant pumpkin grower and the gal that liked to grow hot peppers. It would include sweet old ladies that enjoy growing African violets and stay-at-home gardening moms that home school their kids where every trip to the backyard is a field trip. The Gardeners’ Hall of Fame would include the Amish farmer through no reason other than common sense is growing food without the use of chemicals, the single gal in the city that only has room for a few tomato plants on her south-facing balcony and the 24 kids in Miss Johnson’s second grade classroom that planted sunflower seeds in repurposed yogurt cups to take home to their moms. Sports are fun and hard work. Even being a fan can be hard work when you consider the amount of audacity it takes to wear that jersey to that game knowing that other team’s fans are going to be staring at you, snickering or worse. We gardeners don’t have a jersey. We are all on one team. We can spot one another by the sparkle in our eyes and the dirt under our finger nails. We are gardeners.


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