Josh First's Blog

America as a garden or a bank account

With “Gardening Month” June behind us, our backyard gardens are starting to go into overdrive, and really produce the produce. The most popular garden items are zucchini and tomatoes, followed by cucumbers, green beans, other species of squash, lettuce, and herbs. Our own garden is well watered and well fertilized. Last year we put in over 800 pounds of horse manure and 160 pounds of lime, as well as a lot of home-made compost. This spring we put in about 100 pounds of our own back yard compost and another 160 pounds of lime, well-tilled deeply into the loam.

Every year we rotate the locations where the garden plants are placed. Repeated planting in the same spot results in both insect pests and fungi becoming settled there, and a constant problem. Well do I remember visiting Kokomo, Indiana, in the mid 1990s. I was there as a representative of the US EPA. We held a public hearing on the use of an anti-anthracnose/fungicide that posed some health risks, but also was saving the butts of the local and regional farmers.  Kokomo County is where a huge portion of America’s summertime cantaloupes had been grown for a very long time, and the diseases attacking cantaloupes had become hard-baked into the soil.

I learned then and there not to keep planting the same plants in the same exact locations every growing season. Rather, rotate them around to different parts of the garden every season.

With daily watering, routine plant maintenance (e.g. zucchini plants should have the old bottom leaves removed every couple days, and checked daily for vine borer eggs) like lightly spraying soapy water onto garden plants and weeds around the garden edge, and regular harvesting, like a lot of other American back yard gardens, ours should be able to produce a lot of organic food for our family to eat all year long.

There is also a refreshing symmetry to the garden of having put in a lot of work on it, and then reaping a lot of benefits from it. Someone should write a book about gardening, traditional human values, and personal development. One thing I do see is a garden as a symbol of America, or as a bank account.

As currently run by corrupt career politicians in both political parties, America is not being well tended or maintained as a garden must be kept.

Said another way, if America is a bank account, it has not had any deposits made into it for a long time, and it is way over-drawn.

And no, I am not (yet) advocating for the garden to be watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. But a garden must be watered, and its weeds must be pulled, if its plants are to grow and bear fruit. A bank account must have deposits if it is to have anything to withdraw from it when one requires money to buy food or clothing. There are a thousand individual public policy corolaries to the nation-as-garden theme.

Why is it that America is not being cared for and dutifully tended as a garden, or even as a basic child’s bank account, by the people who run it? Why is America being treated as a place where people, any people, can just take take take and keep on taking, as if there is no end to the garden produce or the money?

Yes, I think one political party is more at fault for this failure, but there is no ignoring that most of the Republicans have committed almost all of the same failures as their opponents, only just less so, because the Republicans are not as competent at purposeful mismanagement. Believe me, if they could do what the Democrats do, the Republicans surely would.

So why are American voters not demanding that their elected representatives follow really basic values and practices for maintaining America? Why is legislation that guarantees that only American citizens can vote being torpedoed? Why would elected representatives or American citizens want voter fraud? Voter fraud means that the garden will die! There will be no democracy or freedom to enjoy! There will be no money in the bank when we need it most!

Squash vine borer eggs on a zucchini leaf. Just tear or snip off the part of the leaf these are on. Check for them daily. These could be called illegal border jumping aliens, unjustifiably siphoning off our hard work.