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My New Field of Dreams: Who Knew Gardening Could Be So Much Fun?
I love a good salad, especially one with juicy tomatoes, with crunchy cucumbers and onions, and with bits of basil leaves on top for additional flavor. My wife and I usually have a salad with our evening meal, and we often add other items such as celery, carrots, peppers, olives, cranberries, pepitas, goat cheese, and artichoke hearts to our bowl of lettuce or spring mix. Lately, though, our salads have possessed an additional special quality because for the first time in my 70 years of life, I actually planted a garden and harvested some of those ingredients.
Why did I never plant a garden previously? Two reasons: baseball and teaching. For the first 25 years of my life, I was so captivated by the game of baseball that I spent my spring and summer seasons on the infield basepaths and outfield grasses of America’s pastime. I used all of my youthful energy trying to hit or catch that white spheroid with 108 red stitches. And when I wasn’t playing, I spent a majority of my time watching or reading about my baseball heroes: Mickey Mantle and the Yankees and Tom Seaver and the Mets. I was a baseball fanatic, and I clearly didn’t have time for agriculture.
When I finished college and finally realized I wasn’t good enough to actually play professionally for either of those New York teams, that should have been an…
