Garden roots

I'm new to gardening, so it goes without saying that I am having a lot of new and interesting experiences.

I have found it easier to get up early in the morning now that I have stopped watching TV (an unexpected side benefit), and it is much easier to work in my garden in the cool of the morning before work than in the hot Oklahoma evenings we are having now days.

As I was working in the cool earth in my garden this last week, it occurred to me the irony of my family history. I have researched both sides of my family all of the way back to early America. Farming and gardening were the mainstays of my family far back into history. My paternal grandfather was a share cropper, my grandmother the gardener of the family. They grew cotton and corn as the cash crops, my grandmother contributing to the food on the table with her garden. For the most part, gardening for her wasn't a hobby or a way to save money or eat more healthfully, but to eat at all. By the time I knew her, she hated vegetable gardening, only growing flowers. It reminded her of a very hard life.

My maternal grandfather was a wheat farmer in his youth, although he could be said to be the first to turn away from farming and became a mule teamster. He did go back to farming, though, because by the 1930 census he is listed as a milker on a dairy.

The first people I have found on my mother's side in America settled Pennsylvania in 1728. According to his will, he owned a large plantation around Carlisle, PA, and built several mills.

The one line I have back the farthest is on my father's side, and dates back to the 1500s in Elizabethan England, county Kent just outside of London. It adds to the irony that this was the only generation I could find who was not a farmer of some sort. He was a trugger. I had to look that one up. He created trugs, which were the flat baskets people used to carry vegetables from the garden or the market. Basically, he was a basket weaver, but it was still related to growing things.

All of the other generations of direct ancestors of all lines that I have traced back were farmers (well, there was a pirate, but he doesn't count). My parents were the first generation who were not.

The irony for me is that here I am trying to get back to what my ancestors did for hundreds (probably thousands) of years before me, and something that my grandmother grew to hate so much she refused to do once she no longer had to.

Is it in our genes? Is the desire to garden or farm, to work in the earth, genetic? I don't know. I do know that I am enjoying it a great deal, much more than I expected. I feel connected to my ancestors in ways I can't explain. I think of them in their fields and gardens, when I work in my little plot, and feel satisfied.

I think there is something deep in the human psyche that makes us want to do this. It is how we have survived for a long, long time.