A Season For All Things

My full time job, while not farming, is not very far afield.  As an extension agent I have the privilege to serve our local producers of ornamental plants and sod to their own productive ends as well as procuring environmental and economic benefits to the citizens of our county.  I am tasked with educating them in methods of conservation and efficiency towards increasing farm productivity and minimizing wastes.  In the course of my wanderings for information I came across a fellow by the name of Liberty Hyde Bailey.  He was also an agriculture educator based in Cornell and his ideas inspired the Extension System.  He was a prolific horticulture writer and poet.  Here is an exerpt of his writing I thought you might enjoy and to which our farm supporters can attestify to.  Take note of the date at the end.  I wonder what he would think about our produce stream now found in our nation's food system.
"As millions of people do not have gardens, so are they unaware of the low quality of much of the commercial produce as compared with things well grown in due season. Most persons, depending on the market, do not know what a superlative watermelon is like. Even such apparently indestructible things as cucumbers have a crispness and delicacy when taken directly from the vine at proper maturity that are lost to the store-window supply. Every vegetable naturally loses something of itself in the process from field to consumer. When to this is added the depreciation by storage, careless exposure and rough handling, one cannot expect to receive the full odor and the characteristic delicacies that belong to the product in nature. We must also remember the long distances over which much of the produce must be transported, and the necessity to pick the produce before it is really fit, to meet the popular desire to have vegetables out of season and when we ought not to want them. There is a time and place for everything, vegetables with the rest. Modern methods of marketing, storing and handling have facilitated transactions, and they have also done very much to safeguard the produce itself and to deliver it to the customer in good condition; but the vegetable well chosen and well grown and fresh from the garden is nevertheless the proper standard of excellence. It is a surpassing satisfaction when the householder may go to her own garden rather than to the store for her lettuce, onions, tomatoes, beets, peas, cabbage, melons, and other things good to see and to eat, and to have them in generous supply." -L.H. Bailey, The Principles of Vegetable-Gardening, 1921