Outdoor Kids in an Inside World by Steven Rinella

Author:Steven Rinella [Rinella, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

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We prioritize generosity with the vegetables we grow. One year, in Seattle, we had an astounding stand of pole beans that grew on an eight-foot-tall teepee-shaped trestle built from saplings that we’d cut off on a friend’s property. The vines reached the top, then doubled over and nearly reached back to the ground. We started to freeze some of the beans but then had to admit that frozen beans aren’t half as good as fresh beans. We sent the kids around our neighborhood with bags of beans to give away. We also invited four or five neighbors to come over and pick a few meals’ worth. When they came, I’d tell the kids to help them pick some beans and whatever else they might like. Perhaps our neighbors were overenthusiastic in their praise of the beans just to make the kids feel good, but either way the impact was noteworthy. Our kids found a tremendous sense of pride in being able to share their food with others, to the point that I had to throttle back their generosity in order to ensure that we’d have some vegetables left over for ourselves.

One of the reasons that I encourage our kids to give away vegetables is that I’m eager to offset the inherent selfishness of gardening. I’m sensitive to the fact that everything we do to protect our plants—the weed pulling, slug killing, and fence building—could strike a child as intensely territorial. I worry that we might seem to be too aggressive in our manipulations of the earth, as though we play God in terms of which living things get preference and which get persecution. It would seem even worse if the product of those efforts were too selfishly guarded or, worse, allowed to go to waste. Gardens are best regarded as an earthy tool of humanitarianism. The things you grow are a cocktail made from dirt, sun, water, and love, and it’s a drink best shared with neighbors and loved ones.

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