The first time I decided to plant a garden was when I lived on a remote island off the coast of Maine, as a 24-year-old suburbanite, without electricity, running water, car, telephone, or any other modern thing. After two and a half years of intense “religious experiences” while studying with a sculptor in Kentucky, I decided to devote the rest of my days to the contemplation of godly things in an austere, windswept setting, where I would embody the quintessential “simple life”. Self-sufficiency (my new-found passion) would enable me to avoid a mundane and mindless 9-to-5 existence and thus I could immerse myself completely in the spiritual realm; thus, not only did I have to learn to spin and weave and wield an axe, but also grow the food I was unable to forage, such as carrots, potatoes, cabbage, and beans.  

Since I was utterly impoverished when I dwelled upon that island, I had to ask my father in Connecticut to please send me a book on organic gardening; he picked Eliot Coleman’s “The New Organic Grower”, which is still my favorite, to this day, as regards organic gardening. But, despite Monsieur Coleman’s advising, in the beginning of my gardening “career”, it all seemed extremely daunting to me, regardless of the fact that my elderly fisherman-farmer neighbors volunteered to help me with my first garden plot ever…. My lack of confidence got in the way of success, and when weeds finally attained the upper hand I threw in the towel; but three springs later, when I was married and living on a fjord in Norway, my young husband Erik and I had another go at it. We started small, and that garden was also a bit of a disaster that first summer.  

However, the next summer, after Erik had spent a year studying organic and biodynamic agriculture at Sogn Jord og Hagebruksskule, a nearby farming school in Aurland, our garden was a sight to behold. That roadless farm on the Nærøyfjord had been used to produce food since Viking times, and the soil was ineffably rich and teeming with life, never having been amended with anything but animal manure, seaweed, wood ash, and compost. The farm was at the bottom of a deep crack, in the shadow of enormous mountains rising 6,000 feet straight up from sea level: no sunbeams reached our garden for six and a half months of the year; and when the sun did finally return it was only fleetingly, for the first month or two…. Nevertheless; when the heat of summer finally came, our cottage garden verily exploded with life…. We grew poppies and camomile and corn flowers alongside our broccoli, rhubarb, black currants, and parsnips; the health of the soil kept various pests at bay. It seemed to us we had mastered the gardening part of food production (in addition to our first flock of sheep, our handful of chickens, and a few pigs); the next task at hand was learning the art of preservation. Needless to say, many more years were required to learn these skills…… And, after being a gardener for the last thirty years or so, I do have to admit that there is ALWAYS more to learn………