Excerpt from The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe

It took a long time for one of my parents to embrace my choice of an agrarian career. A nice bit of old advice that floats past you when you are least able to use it is "If you do something you love, you'll never have to work a day in your life." That's how I feel about farm labour. I love it. I love the challenge and I love the end result. While reading The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deepe, I found this lovely paragraph about gardening that really resonated with me:

"I think accumulating money, working at ordinary jobs, collecting stamps, cars, marbles, or anything else, and shopping are all sublimations of our basic hunting and gathering drive. But many of us don't find those substitutes fully satisfying. We enjoy more direct hunting and gathering. Hunting, fishing, and gardening-- these are so satisfying that we will do them for "free"-- even when we don't really need the food. In fact, we will often pay a good bit to do them. [...] A big part of what we are after is just the joy that comes from that simple, purposeful, productive labor. We want to work for our food. Part of our essential nature is that we are hunters and gatherers. We want to hunt and gather. We create gardens so as to have a place that is an ideally rewarding place to hunt and gather."

As the snow settles over the garden, I am already longing to return to work next season. Maybe there is something to what Carol Deppe has reasoned.