Shall I not have intelligence with
the earth?
Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
- Henry David Thoreau
This cabbage, these carrots, these
potatoes, these onions ... will soon become me. Such a tasty fact!
- Mike Garofalo
The artist Arcimboldo drew a "Portrait of the Emperor Rudolph
II as Autumn."
This Man made out of Vegetables and Fruits is a delightful
characterization of the real truth in this case.
Digging potatoes is always an
adventure, somewhat akin to fishing. There is forever the possibility that the next
cast - or the next thrust of the digging fork - will turn up a clunker.
- Jerome Belanger
"Of the
two thousand or so species in the bulging genus Solanum, about 170
are tuber-bearers. Of the tuber-bearers, only eight are routinely cultivated
and eaten by people, and most of these have stuck pretty close to home in the Andes of
Peru.
Only one has reached international stardom: S. tuberosum, commonly known
as the potato. The potato probably originated in Peru, where indications are
that it was domesticated over six thousand years ago by high-altitude-dwelling
ancestors of the Incas."
- Blue Corn and Square Tomatoes: Unusual Facts about Common Garden
Vegetables.
By Rebecca Rupp. Garden Way Publishing 1987.
Francisco Pizarro found the potato in Ecuador and brought them to Spain in the early sixteenth century. By 1633, John Gerard's Herball included a whole chapter on the potato.
In the night the cabbages catch at
the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.
- Carl Sandburg
Karen Garofalo, Labor Day, 9/5/2011
Jokes, Riddles and Humor for Gardeners
Tomatoes and squash never fail to
reach maturity. You can spray them with acid,
beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.
- S. J. Perelman
And he gave it for his opinion, that
whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Vegetable gardening might be considered one
of the great conservative rituals.
- David M. Tucker, 1993
Why do potatoes make good detectives?
Because they keep their eyes peeled.
Fruits and Nuts - Quotes for Gardeners
It's difficult to think anything but pleasant
thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.
- Lewis Grizzard
What do you get if you divide the
circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?
Pumpkin pi.
I am thinking of the onion
again. ... Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.
- Erica Jong, Fruits and Vegetables, 1971
It's no use boiling your cabbage
twice.
- Irish proverb
As a whole, the temple represents a deified mountain - a
place of creation, a source of life-giving water (such as a cave, spring, stream, or waterfall), and birthplace of the sacred maize plant. The head of this mountain deity, which combines the attributes of both mother and father, is depicted on the lower central part of the roof crest, with a cleft in its forehead from which maize sprouts.
- Mayan Temple in Copan,
Mexico
Sex is good, but not as good as
fresh, sweet corn.
-
Garrison Keillor
As for vegetables, I do not consider
a plot of ground devoted to them worthy of the honorable name of garden. Vegetables are, of course, a part of gardening, but the least, the last, --for those who do not have to raise them, the most dishonorable part.
- H. G. Dwight,
Gardens and Gardens
My Majesty made for him a garden anew
in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.
- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)
How can you tell a chili bean from a
regular bean?
The chilly one wears a shawl.
The first gatherings of the garden in May of
salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby - how could anything so beautiful be mine. And
this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.
- Alice B. Toklas
Sowe Carrets in you Gardens, and
humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing.
- Richard Gardiner
Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens
(1599)
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a
useful plant to its culture.
- Thomas Jefferson
What vegetable did Noah not take on the ark?
Leeks.
Last night we had three small zucchini for
dinner that were grown within fifty feet of our back door. I estimate they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $371.49
each.
- Andy Rooney
Its bizarre that the produce manager
is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.
- Meryl Streep
He had been eight years upon a
project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in
raw, inclement summers.
- Jonathan Swift
Zucchinis terrific!
Like bunnies, prolific!
- Author Unknown
It's a guy thing to
plant vegetables in your front flower bed, but then again, it's also a guy thing to put them out back in a big rectangle. It's a
little radical to put them in front, a statement that you can do whatever you want in your own damn yard.
- Warren Schultz
The trouble is, you cannot grow just one
zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground
quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.
- Dave Barry
I used to visit and revisit it a
dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse
Onion Garden
A Concrete Poem by Michael P. Garofalo
'crete 'oems: mpgarofalo
An idealist is one who, on noticing
that roses smell better than a cabbage,
concludes that it will also make better soup.
- Henry L. Mencken
What did one bean say to the other
bean?
How you bean doing?
Our vegetable garden is coming along
well, with radishes and beans up,
and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.
- E. B. White
Better to eat vegetables and fear no
creditors, than eat duck and hide from them.
- The Talmud
"In order to live off a garden, you
practically have to live in it.
- Frank McKinney Hubbard
What do you do when a tomato goes on
strike?
You picket.
Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 3,500 Quotes Arranged by 150 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clichés, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among the roots, the maiden-fair
Wine scented and poetic soul
of the capacious salad bowl.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
There's no getting blood out of
a turnip.
- Frederick Marryat, 1792 - 1848
in the water bucket
a melon and an eggplant
nodding to each other
- Yosa Buson
Fine words butter no parsnips.
Nature, at whose feet every one who does any gardening must sit and learn, settled the question ages and ages before mankind began to cultivate flowers, by creating the annual as the great filler-in of the vegetable world - the finishing touch to her handiwork.
- Benjamin Goodrich
The best hemp and the best tobacco
grow on the same kind of soil.
The former article is of the first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful.
- Thomas Jefferson
The abundance of everything around
was so great, that .. over-ripe fruit strewed the ground unheeded, while peas and beanstalks, still loaded, were blackening and yellowing in the sun; and vegetables running on all sides to waste.
- Anne Marsh
I do not like broccoli. And I haven't
liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.
- George Bush, U.S. President, 1990
Let my words, like vegetables, be
tender and sweet, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.
- Author Unknown
A garden, the, is a finite place, in
which a gardener (or several gardeners) has created, working with or against nature, a plot whose intention it is to provide pleasure; possibly in the form of beauty, possibly in the form of cabbages - and possibly, beautiful cabbages.
- Abby Adams, The Gardener's Gripe Book
What do you call a stolen yam?
A hot potato.
When gardening, I have one gift
You won't find in any manuals -
I know it's strange, but I can change
Perennials to annuals."
- Dick Emmons
Winter squashes are
the forgotten vegetables. Almost no vegetable is as easy to grow or keep. With fertile soil, full
sun and ample water, vines take off. And after plants become established, they're so carefree, it's easy to forget them until fall when their rediscovery makes the harvest that much sweeter.
- Andy Tomolonis
For all things produced in a garden,
whether of salads or fruits, a poor man will eat better that has one of his own, than a rich man that has none.
- J. C. Loudoun
Most plants taste better when they've
had to suffer a little.
- Diana Kennedy
Cabbage: A vegetable
about as large and wise as a man's head.
- Ambrose Bierce
The greatest delight the fields and woods
minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between
man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me
and I to them.
- Ralph Waldo
What is a Honeymoon Salad?
Lettuce alone, with no dressing.
Garlic is as good as ten mothers.
To my favorite honeydew, do you carrot all
for me?
My heart beets for you, with your turnip nose, and radish face.
You are a peach. If we cantaloupe, lettuce marry.
Weed make a swell pear.
- Author Unknown
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of
evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther,
and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of
reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of
cauliflowers,
jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
- Doris Lessing
Just washed,
How chill
The white leeks!
- Basho
Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clichés, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Ripe vegetables were magic to
me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with
possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato,
sounding its redness
from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's
hood of
heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing
underneath could make me catch my breath.
- Michael Pollan
Have you heard of the garlic diet?
You don't lose much weight, but from a distance your friends think you look thinner.
The west wasn't won on salad.
- North Dakota Beef Council advertisement, 1990
An onion can make people cry, but there's no
vegetable that can make them laugh.
- Anonymous
Each year the big garden grew smaller and
Jane - who grew flowers by choice,
not corn or stringbeans - worked at the vegetables more than I did. Each winter
I
dreamed crops, dreamed marvels of canning ... and each summer I largely
failed.
Shamefaced, I planted no garden at all."
- Donald Hall
People are like Potatoes!
Some people never seem motivated to participate, but are content to
watch others ...
They are called "Speck Tators."
Some are always looking to cause problems and really get under your
skin ...
They are called "Aggie Tators."
There are those who are always saying they will, but somehow, they
never get around to doing ...
We call them "Hezzie Tators."
- From the
laughalot-owner on the Net
Some folks spent a lot of time sitting and peering into their
garden ...
They are called "Medi Tators."
There are those that try to maximize their crop yields while reducing
expenses ...
We call them "Compu Tators."
- Mike Garofalo
When is a cucumber like a strawberry?
When one is in a pickle and the other is in a jam.
Clichés - Quotes for Gardeners
A strawberry blossom will not sweeten
dry bread.
- Buganda Proverb
The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and
pale as if made of cheap green paper,
broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such
fertility,
a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.
- John Updike
I came to love my rows, my beans, though so
many more than I wanted.
They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.
- Henry David Thoreau
What vegetable can tie your stomach in knots?
String beans.
Cabbages, whose heads, tightly folded
see and hear nothing of this world,
dreaming only on the yellow and green magnificence that is hardening within them.
- John Haines
Now in the east
the white bean
and the great squash
are tied with the rainbow.
Listen! the rain's drawing near!
The voice of the bluebird is heard.
- Navaho Indian Chant, Songs in the Garden of the House God
The word 'vegetable' has no precise
botanical meaning in reference to food plants,
and we find that almost all parts of plants
have been employed as vegetables - roots
(carrot and beet), stems (Irish potato and
asparagus), leaves (spinach and lettuce),
leaf stalk (celery and Swiss chard), bracts
(globe artichoke), flower stalks and buds
(broccoli and cauliflower), fruits (tomato and
squash), seeds (beans), and even the
petals (Yucca and pumpkin).
- Charles Heiser, Seed to Civilization
Why is it not wise to tell secrets in a
cornfield?
There are too many ears.
Can the garden afford any thing more
delightful to view than those forests of asparagus,
artichokes, lettuce, pease, beans and
other legumes and edulous plants so different in
colour and of such various shapes, rising
at it were from the dead and piercing the ground
in so many thousand places as they do,
courting the admiration or requiring the care of
the diligent Gardiner.
- Stephen Switzer, The Practical Gardener, 1727
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer
and then you find there is nothing in it.
- James Gibbons Huneker
As for vegetables, I do not consider
a plot of
ground devoted to them worthy of the honorable name of
garden. Vegetables are, of course, a part of gardening, but the
least, the last, for those who do not have to raise them, the
most dishonorable part.
- H. G. Dwight,
Gardens and Gardening,
Atlantic Monthly, 1912
Pulling
Onions
Observations and Quips of a Gardener
Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian;
wine and tarragon make it French.
Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek.
Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.
- Alice May Brock
The garden should be adorned with roses and
lilies, the turnsole, violets, and mandrake;
there you should have parsley, cost, fennel, southern-wood, coriander, sage, savory,
hyssop, mint, rue, dittany, smallage, pellitory, lettuces, garden-cress, and peonies.
There
should also be beds planted with onions, leeks, garlic, pumpkins and shallots.
The
cucumber growing in its lap, the drowsy poppy, the daffodil and brank-ursine ennoble
a garden. Nor are there wanting, if occasion further thee, pottage-herbs:
beets,
herb-mercury, orache, sorrel and mallows, anise, mustard, white pepper and
wormwood do good service to the gardener.
- Alexander of Neckham, Of the Nature of Things, 1187
What is small, red and whispers?
A hoarse radish.
An ear of corn is 80% water.
What was paradise, but a
garden full of vegetables
and herbs and pleasure? Nothing there but delights.
- William Lawson
Completely dried up,
They've become beans.
- Santoka Taneda, 1882-1940
Mountain Tasting, Translated by John Stevens
Let food be your medicine and
medicine be your food.
- Hippocrates
He who sows peas on the highway does
not get all the pods into his barn.
- Danish Proverb
Life . . . is an onion. One
peels it while crying.
- Author Unknown
In our gardens, Lord Ganesha sends
His power through fruits
and vegetables, the ones that grow above the ground, to permeate
our nerve system with wisdom, clearing obstacles in our path
when eaten. The growers of them treat it like they would
care for Ganesha in His physical form.
- Hindu Deva Shastra, verse 438,
Nature Devas
Native Americans all over the U.S. and Canada use a term
they call the Three Sisters
to describe the Native American way of life through the gardening technique of
planting corn, beans and squash together on the same mound. These Three Sisters
- corn,
beans and squash supplement and compliment each other. The vines of the bean
plant
grow up the corn stalk. The huge leaves of the squash vines keep the ground
moist for
all of the roots. The nutritious vitamins from each of the plants escapes into
the soil
so that they each benefit from one another.
- Deborah Champlain
In the right place at the right time,
tomato worms on tomato vines.
She is perfectly still, calm and concerned;
poised by the vines, hunting for worms.
- Mike Garofalo, Cuttings
in my garden
I pick a musk melon
feeling like a thief
- Yosa Buson
I believe that the energy of humans
who touched those beans goes into
the beans as well. They become vibrant because of the handling. This
vibrancy is something that a machine or harvester doesn't have. From
my standpoint ... I believe that if food is grown and prepared with love ...
infused with love ... well, it can be the humblest of food, but because
it's prepared with love, it's special.
- Valerie Phipps, Pescadero, California
Shadows from a slice of moonshine
Ripple round the sagging vines
Unburdened of their sweet red sex,
Withered, grotesquely bent, impotent.
Yet they live on, now as I:
Mouthfuls of wet seeds turned to chyme,
Reborn as muscles, eyes, and Mind.
- Mike Garofalo,
Cuttings: September
Links and References
Asian Vegetables
Dictionary, research, and great links.
The Best Gardening and Organic
Gardening Sites
Books-for-Cooks
Chez Panisse
Vegetables. By Alice Waters. Illustrated by Patricia Curtan.
Harper Collins, 1996.
368 pages. ISBN: 0060171472. Lavishly illustrated, highly
informative, outstanding cookbook.
Claire's
Italian Feast: 165 Vegetarian Recipes from Nonna's Kitchen. By Claire
Criscuolo.
Plume Books, 1998.
224 pages. ISBN: 0452278813.
Elizabeth and Crow's Awesome Organic
Cybergarden
The Heretic's
Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. By Colin Spencer. University
Press of
New England, Reprint Edition, 1996. ISBN: 0874517605.
Howard Garrett's Basic Organic Program
Gardening Naturally, The
Natural Gardener
Native American Technology
and Art
No Time Productions Useful information on a
variety of herbs, Latin terms, and many
nice products: herbs, good books, pots, etc..
Vegetable Research and Information Center.
University of California at Davis.
Vegetable Index.
Oregon State University. Excellent!
The Vegetarian
Feast. By Martha Rose Shulman. Harper Perennial Library, 1995.
Revised Edition. 320 pages. IISBN: 0060950013.
Organic Gardening
and Farming Resources
Yahoo's
Links to Organic Gardening
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips and Whimsy by Michael P.
Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Clichés for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Clichés, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Green Way Research
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Ways to Communicate with Mike
Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Vegetables - Quotes for Gardeners. 5.1
This document was first distributed on the Internet on January 1, 1999.
Green Way Research
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong