
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 8, 1992                   TAG: 9203090240
SECTION: HOMES                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE NICHOLS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GETTING DOWN TO EARTH

THIS is the time of year when many people suddenly want to plant a garden - to get outdoors and engage in manual labor involving sweat and dirt and bugs and cow manure. Mind you, these are the same people who during the rest of the year, if given a choice between being around cow manure and having their spleen removed through their ear, would ask: "Uh, about how much does that hurt?"

Perhaps you, too, have been exhibiting gardening symptoms. You get envious when you see a farm with its straight row after row of lean, green lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers - boot camp for salad ingredients. In your organic envy, you mentally undress the pea pods.

You find yourself poring intently over seed catalogs; in hardware stores you stare dreamily at the seed packets. Who can blame you? The illustrations in seed catalogs and on packets promise the biggest, most colorful produce - beans, beets, eggplants and carrots of bright, vivid greens and reds and purples and oranges not found anywhere else in nature except on golfers.

The illustrations promise pumpkins that could house a family of four, corn stalks so tall that they could hold elected office in some states, okra pods the size of Scud missiles, only more accurate.

But in truth the size of your vegetables is not important. They can be shriveled, dysfunctional, underachiever vegetables - vegetables that, if they were people, would routinely get lost driving home from work.

What is important is the process - getting outdoors, getting in touch with nature, with honest manual labor amid the elemental forces of life itself. After all, these days most of us are confined to our sterile offices and homes, far from The Great Outdoors. To most of us The Great Outdoors is that vaguely terrifying stretch between our porch and our car. How far we have gotten from the good earth, how out of touch with nature's cycle of life: birth, growth, death, probate.

But a home garden lets you get back in touch. Let's say you want to plant tomatoes, which are among our most popular crops (despite the fact that their insides are repulsive - so repulsive that even tomato plants themselves will pollinate only while blindfolded).

First you prepare the soil: Till it, rake it, fertilize it. Then you plant the seeds. In a few days, you go outside to discover that a miracle has been wrought: seedlings! You weed and water them. As your plants grow, you come to feel protective of them, to think of them almost as your children. The difference is that your tomato plants won't phone you at 3 a.m. some Friday night begging for bail money and babbling about some teen-age prank involving your pastor's lawn, a six-pack, and full frontal nudity.

At last, after weeks of love and labor comes the day of harvest. Your garden has been satisfying and a bargain. Typical expenses: $1 package of seeds, $5 fertilizer, $5 blood meal, $5 bone meal, $5 herbicides, $5 pesticides, $10 scarecrow, $15 soil-test kit, $50 garden tools, $3 linament, $2 Band-Aids, $5,000 medical treatment after you step on upturned rake tines and slam the handle into your head, causing a concussion that leaves you convinced that you are Charlemagne.

Yes, a pound of tomatoes bought in the supermarket costs 60 cents, a pound of tomatoes grown in your very own garden costs $5,106. But just think of how popular your homemade salsa will be at the annual Holy Roman Emperors Potluck Supper.

by CNB