A little garden history

The history of agriculture can be traced back to at least 10,000 years, when primitive people found the need to supplement their meat-eating diet with plants. They found that this food could be stored away for those times when game became harder to come by.

As the need grew, they learned how to depend less on picking wild food and more on planting and cultivating it in garden plots. Evidence of early gardening has been found in the cave paintings of early man, symbols in Egyptian tombs, as well as drawings found in Persia, China, Japan and other far-flung places. Clearly, gardens existed wherever man had the need to feed himself.

Here in what came to be known as America, the early European explorers found gardening alive and well among the native populations. Squash, corn, beans and pumpkins were their main crops. For the most part, the men did the heavy cultivating and plowing, using bone tools, while the women managed the crops. As the explorers moved further south to Central and South America, there too they found thriving communities actively engaged in agriculture. It was there in the mountainous regions where they found the Aztecs and the Incas had developed the fine art of terrace gardening and irrigation. Remnants of those gardens

still exist today, so the historical record

is clear.

During those years of discovery, the explorers brought with them those plants and foods that were common in their homelands, for eventual planting in the new territories where they hoped to settle. Doing so, they introduced species and varieties of plants still unknown to the natives. Then on their return trips home, they brought with them seeds and plants from the new world back to the old. The same things were happening in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And thus, over time there was a constant exchange and introduction of foods worldwide.

Today, because of this interchange of plant products over so many generations, we home gardeners have available to us just about anything, climate allowing. True, we can’t grow pineapples here on Long Island (although we could in a hothouse), and we can’t grow bananas (same principle), but we can grow all the things suitable for a temperate climate such as ours. Tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuces, peppers, beets, etc. — we can grow them all.

People of a certain age can remember the “Victory Gardens” of World War II. To supply our troops with food both here and abroad, as well as our allies across the sea whose farms were being destroyed by the war, the farm system in America was working at full capacity and straining to stay ahead of the demand. To relieve some of that strain, Americans were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens, where in their backyards they could grow fruits and vegetables for their own consumption. It was a hugely popular idea at

the time, and it was also seen as a patriotic duty.

Recently, backyard gardening has seen a surge in the number of home gardeners filling the local garden centers, where they load up on trays of seedlings to be transplanted in their backyard gardens. Today, there is a different reason behind the movement. A deeper awareness of the foods we eat and the chemicals used to grow them make home gardening an attractive alternative.

But those same gardeners who fill the garden centers every spring might think about taking the garden experience one step further and grow their own plants from seed. This way they can then take the process all the way from the very beginning to the end, and have a whale of a good time doing it. There’s a much greater satisfaction that comes with picking a big, juicy tomato when you know that you started it from seed. Try it — you’ll like it.

Frank Salerno’s book “From Seed To Salad” was published in 2011. Reach him at: seedsalad@verizon.net.