A couple of weeks ago, I was crowing about the amazing progress of the national media in following the home gardening story. No doubt about it, stories about gardening appear in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today and countless smaller newspapers. Since I believe that home gardening is one of the answers to hunger in this nation, not to mention obesity, poverty and boredom, I was thrilled. If people become gardeners, I’ve reasoned, they’ll feed themselves and re-learn some of the self-sufficiency and memories of culture that they must re-learn to gain power over their lives. The gifts of neighborhood and democracy will flower again.

Boy. I’m a real dork.

It turns out that home gardening is just a growth industry for the corporates. In fact, they’re finding a pernicious new way to close the commons even more tightly. I wonder if Michelle knows about this.

For many of us, the high point of the gardening year is the moment we bite into that first juicy, ripe tomato. On our farm, for years, we’ve been raising open-pollinated heirloom tomatoes. These are interestingly shaped, colored and flavored tomatoes raised from seeds collected in the gardens of grandmothers. Open-pollinated seeds are fertilized naturally by the wind or traveling insects. Unlike hybrids, which are pollinated by humans carrying one blossom to another in the effort to create a specific seed that will yield a specific plant, the open-pollinated seeds are somewhat unpredictable. For that reason, they aren’t much loved by the professional seed companies that value uniformity.