Gardening: or, My Favorite Bedtime Reading

Dear Dad,

It wasn’t until I was almost an adult that I realized not everyone had John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Sufficiency read to them as a bedtime story. It came as kind of a shock when I realized my error. Other children didn’t daydream with their father’s about how to turn a 1-acre plot of land into enough food to feed a family of four? (or better yet, a five acre plot, because then, as you know, you can grow enough food to also feed your cow instead of having to buy in hay. Or resort to having a goat for your milk-producing needs). Really? They just read Narnia? I mean, we read Narnia and loved it. But how did other kids learn how to double-dig a garden bed?

I was fascinated by that big brown book, which always seemed to be hanging around our house. I’m still fascinated by it. I keep my copy on the coffee table. You know, just in case I want to re-read for the hundredth time his witty commentary on the lost art of basket making, or how his kids ate all of his home grown poppy seeds hoping (unsuccessfully) to get a buzz off of them.

Or if I have a pig butchering emergency. It could happen.

I can close my eyes and see the charts about when to start growing what, which only apply if you live in his particular part of England but which I still look at every spring. I can picture the pages about weaving a skep for keeping bees and the different layouts of garden beds for maximum food production.

That book has led me down the crazy path many-a-time. And I’m sure it

Gardening: Thankfully, there is no cure for the Green Plague

Dear Gillian,

It would be overly polite to call the place where my father grew up a “dirt farm.” Dirt, yes. Farm, no. It was more of a divot in the vast forest of northern Idaho with enough bare ground that you could coax cabbage, potatoes and other hearty vegetables through the brief mountain summer.

The 10 Bentley kids did the vegetable coaxing at the end of hoe handles, but only because my notoriously stern grandfather had and used a bigger stick. There was no way in the world he was going pay good money for undistilled consumables.

Dad, then, had a hard time seeing gardening as a hobby. It was a chore that put food on the table. He planted gardens during the leanest times of my boyhood, but treated them a small farms that would ease the grocery budget. He even tried to introduce us to a frost-fighting, north country favorite – Swiss chard. My brother and I drew the line there. We would hoe the weeds, but not eat something with the culinary appeal of pond scum. Or kale.

But when I was in about seventh grade, I caught the Green Plague. I was a voracious reader who became fascinated by stories of farm life, huge vegetables and loan between your toes. Dad thought I had gone mad when tilled and planted a plot near the house. I’m sure he chuckled, however, while I was learning that pulling weeds and