By: Ben Lindwall
Here in Minnesota, during the winter, there is only one way for a stay-at-home-dad to keep his sanity: grow something.
I’ve been gardening for a little over 5 years but have just recently come to realize the offseason benefits of growing food in the winter. As we speak, I’ve got some young spinach, arugula, lettuce, and chard sprouting up underneath my plastic row covers in the backyard (and today’s high in Minneapolis is sixteen degrees Fahrenheit)!
I planted at the end of October, so come the end of March I will have bagfuls of greens to feed my family. If you tend to eat one 12 oz bag of greens in a week, this will save you between $15-$20 a month– even more if you like cooking with greens, in which case you can double or triple your savings at the market.
More importantly, many of us are completely disconnected from knowing who is growing, harvesting, and transporting our food. As a result, many of us eat food that is grown from depleted and over-fertilized soil, lathered in pesticides, picked by exploited workers, and then driven across the country, if not further. This is absolutely unacceptable.
I grow and harvest my greens and my daughter carries them into the house (in return, I let her eat for free). And speaking of kids, have you ever heard a toddler ask for spinach? Well try growing it yourself. While I water the garden, my daughter will ask for leaf after gorgeous green leaf!
Do I really think that gardening is going to make any difference? Totally. As I till my soil, pull weeds, and taste my own produce, I become much more conscious and connected to the process of growing food. It doesn’t just magically appear. There is actual work involved. I try to take this new consciousness with me to the market. It affects which products I buy and makes me think twice before supporting massive agribusinesses with my grocery budget. I love how Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen put it in their book The Urban Homestead: “Growing your own food is an act of resistance. We can all join [] in dismantling the corporations that are feeding us shit.”
Start with spinach. It’s easy to grow and is packed with nutrition. Plant the seed ¼ of an inch below the soil and keep it moist until it sprouts. Pay attention to what else might begin to sprout. Let your curiosity lead you. Its amazing how one new beginning can lead to another, as well as lots of learning along the way.
I planted my first seed before I had kids and for purely selfish reasons. Today I garden for peace of mind, family nutrition, and even justice. For me, this is especially important in the middle of Minnesota, in the middle of December.
Ben lives in Minneapolis MN, with his wife and two kids and is a stay at home dad and life long Twins fans. That means he has to suffer through great seasons only to lose to the Yankees in the playoffs every year. Along with gardening Ben brews beer, listens to great music, and has an advanced degree in whittling.
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I think of myself as a much better parent than I actually am. In the past when I saw frustrated mothers wrenching the arms of petulant children in the aisles of grocery stores, I shook my head disapprovingly and thought how I would do it differently, how I would use words to explain why the world works the way it does and how I would instill feelings of compassion and goodwill in my children by example. But that was all before I actually had a two year old who drives his trucks forcefully over his newborn brother’s head, who runs out into the street in the flash of an eye and screams to eat grapenuts cereal when I give him kix (silly me). As the author of the book I just finished said about her two year old, she must constantly “foil his attempts to kill himself” and I might add, foil my own attempts to wring his skinny little neck. Because obviously grapenuts will not kill him but the process of explaining to me that he wants one thing over another gets him and me worked up into such a lather that one of us ends up screaming and crying. And in these moments, I am irrational. I yell and snap and have even been known to wrench an arm here and there. Because thinking of a way to explain to him that he must not propel himself down the ravine of our backyard atop his riding truck takes too long. I must snatch him out of danger, not explain to him how to make good decisions so he keeps himself firmly planted on the cement of our back patio. No one warned me about this part of parenting. I thought that if you are a level-headed relatively laid back person in regular life, that you might be mostly that same person as a parent. Not so. I mean, I do have my good moments where he and I excitedly make connections between the ducks on the stream near our house and the ducks in the books that we read or that Grandpa Tom Tom does indeed have an RV like that one on TV and many others. But I am not the parent that I pictured I would be. I am the type to breathe a sigh of relief when they are both asleep because I am no longer on lifeguard duty or give in and feed him chocolate easter eggs because I don’t want to fight him and explain the nonexistant nutritional value of the candy coating. In short, I am more impatient and lazy.
