On April 4, 2009, I responded via email to a question from Dan Dewitt, a reporter for the “St. Petersburg Times. He had heard I was living in a small community called Spring Lake growing muscadine grapes and an organic vegetable garden. After an apparent failure at trying to start his own small garden, he wondered why doing it seemed to be getting popular generally and was wondering why the phenomenon, why was it becoming a ‘thing’? In 2009, remember, we were deeply into a world-wide recession, suffering economically, and involved in a perplexing and costly “War Against Terror.”
-----Original Message-----
From: Sonny Vergara
Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 7:55 PM
To: Dan DeWitt
Subject: Why the backyard garden?
Dan,
No, I don’t live directly on the lake, but it was, in fact,
surrounded by groves at one time. In fact, most of the open pastures and
hay fields in Spring Lake were groves before the winter freezes of the
1980’s. One can still see the faint outlines of their rows in the terrain
on my 20 acres, for example, which is now a pasture. Not sure in what
year the worst freezes occurred but when they did it devastated Florida’s
citrus industry … again.
The first time the industry was hit in Florida was toward
the end of the 19th century when the citrus belt was much farther
north of here. The little town of Satsuma near Lake George and just south
of Palatka was named after the Satsuma orange, for example, which was planted ubiquitously
throughout that area. In the early 1980’s, I lived in an old wooden house
on the St. Johns River just north of East Palatka that was built to house grove
workers. Interestingly, they had used sphagnum moss for insulation between
the walls. I was told there was at one time a dock nearby where barges carrying
the fruit to the Jacksonville market and elsewhere would tie up to receive
their loads. That was where the citrus belt was then, running east and west,
coast to coast.
After the freeze of 1898 (?), the citrus belt moved south
and by mid-century was running generally east and west through Orlando
including Hernando County and as far south as Highlands County. Even so,
most of the land at that time was just woods, I believe, because the country’s
focus was obviously on WWII and recovering from the Great Depression.
After the war ended, the citrus industry’s markets expanded
exponentially through the fifties and sixties and the central Florida citrus belt
became more defined. “Woods” were converted in large scale and the citrus
industry as we know it today was established. Ownerships were
consolidated and “barons” like Emmitt Evans, Charlie Lykes and Ben Hill Griffin
were created.
It all changed again in the late 1980’s. My memory
isn’t clear, but I remember it happening somewhere around Christmas 1988,
maybe. After that freeze, the citrus acreage in Hernando County was
massively reduced, as it was across all of central Florida. But as fate
would have it, farmers found houses could be “grown” just as profitably, perhaps
more so, and land development became the new face of agriculture … and we all
know where that has taken us today.
But significant to Hernando County, citrus as an industry
was reduced to a few acres and agriculture as an industry was moved to the
brink of extinction. Farmers who held on to their land and didn’t sell to
developers were faced with losing their green belt tax status and thus their
property to impossible ad valorem land taxes. So, if they didn’t sell
outright and they didn’t replant citrus, they planted pine trees. Lots of
them.
Drive around Spring Lake today and you’ll see sour root orange
trees growing among rows of planted slash pine. Why? Because most
of the fruit trees then were sweet orange wood budded onto sour-root
stock. The sour-root stock was heartier and disease resistant. The
freeze killed the budded part of the tree but not the sour-root so it came back
as a sour fruit tree.
Thus, the central Florida citrus belt moved south again, and
agriculture became essentially a hobby in our area to be pursued for tax
purposes or because you don’t play golf. The big guys like those
mentioned concluded that it made no sense to tempt the whims of Florida weather
a second time, so they again moved further south to Collier, Desoto, Hardee,
and Okeechobee counties, anywhere the land was cheap, and the new belt was
established there.
I remember having to process a water use permit for one
grove that was 40 square miles, so large it could be identified by
satellite. It was developed and managed by one entity with portions sold
to others, many from outside the country. I’ve long forgotten the name of
the company but the regulatory folks at the water management district could
probably identify it.
So, what is happening to bring our national focus back to a
vegetable garden in the back yard? In my estimation? It’s the hard
realization that we, as a country or a people, are not invincible.
Terrorism can and probably will reach us again. It’s the fatigue of an
unpopular, unwinnable, intractable, unending war that is creating an historic
national indebtedness that can steal the future of our children and
theirs.
It’s the disastrous failure and subsequent loss of
confidence in one of the greatest economic machines ever known to man.
It’s the realization that the system in which we entrusted our savings and
therefore our fate as aging citizens is so cynical and infected with fraud that
our final years as secure and comfortable elderly humans may well have been
stolen from us.
It’s realization that our political presence on the world
stage is waning even after so many wars, battles, lives and trillions of
dollars spent over the last century ostensibly to make the lives of others
better.
It’s the realization that we will have to pay more than any
of us can afford for energy, and we can and will be held hostage until we pay
the ransom.
It’s the realization that it is foolish to debate further
that our planet is at risk due to our own actions, because we all now know for
a fact that the risk grows even more ominous every day.
It’s because the new global economy which sends us most of
the goods we use and the food we eat, commodities which touch our lives at
every level and which we can no longer produce ourselves, can arrive poisoned
and dangerous.
It is because of the growing realization that the endlessly
partisan and inflexible dogma of our two dominant political parties is, alas,
not at all aimed at improving our lot as a nation of people, but only to
perpetuate and protect the advancement of their own existence even if it risks
the very soul of the nation.
Only because I grow weary just thinking about all the other
problems we can mention, I might offer, finally, that we are interested in
growing our own gardens because we realize how dangerously complex bringing any
one of these issues to resolution will be, much less all of them. And if
we can’t solve all of them what’s going to happen … to us?
I hear a national sigh of resignation for want of something
as simple as a home-grown tomato.
To you I suggest that growing a tomato would seem much more
satisfying and predictable than all the misery of the present world, despite
your unfortunate experience. Try again. It’s good for the
soul.
Drop by sometime. I’ll show you my muscadine vines and
organic garden and share a glass of homemade muscadine wine, if you’re so
inclined.
Regards,
Sonny
