We are gardeners.

We are not farmers.

Thank God.

Being gardeners has taught us volumes about what it must be like to be dependent for one’s living on the ability to make other things grow, be they plants or animals.

Our gardening includes harvesting apples, pears, peaches, plums and blueberries. Bumper crops mean that we have entire winters’ worth of canned or frozen preserves that still retain freshness better than most store-bought products.

Also, we know that our homegrown produce is largely free of pesticides and herbicides. Though that is important to me, it is vital to my wife. I say, “largely free” because wind and water carry many things, some of which inevitably find their way onto our acreage.

But relatively speaking, we are blessed with crops are yummy, even though they might not look as bright, round, full and colorful as those on supermarket shelves. Once the bad spots have been discarded and fed to the chickens, the taste is great.

In some years.

My wife does not cry very often.

But her slumped shoulders and somber visage were clearly sorrowful last month as she gazed upon what 2.5 inches of rain within one hour had done to some just-planted seedlings and just-sown seeds.

We could replant.

We did.

But some farmers can’t do that when nature wracks an entire orchard or pulverizes an entire field with beat-it-down rain, wounding hail, floods, derechoes or tornadoes. They don’t have the money for seed and fuel, or they don’t have the time left in the growing season, or the fields remain machinery-trapping mud bogs.

Our garden tomatoes have been decimated by blight in a few recent years, and by cutworms in other years.

We still eat. We still buy gasoline. We still heat our home.

Our financial ability to support ourselves does not depend on our gardens or our chickens.

We can make a little money selling eggs and veggies if we choose.

But that “make a little money” is actually a misnomer, a warping of the English language made famous in clichÈs about the wife who chirps, “Honey, I just saved $50 by buying these clothes on sale!” while the husband retorts, “Gee, our credit card debt just went up by $200!”

Even without counting the cost of our labor, the expenses for seed and feed, for seedlings, chicks and poults are higher than what we can recoup through sales.

Why do it, then? Why plant a garden or keep chickens?

Taste. Fun. Reconnect with nature, with all the good and bad that comes with doing so.

Some people do earn a profit through keeping chickens or planting crops. But I couldn’t stand the pressure.

Pressure is not foreign to me. For 50 years, I went to work at a newspaper that produced enough words to fill a small book every day, then started the process all over again before the ink had dried on the previous day’s edition.

There is some pressure associated with deciding when, or whether, to publish a story when only some of the circumstances are known, e.g., the wife is dead and the husband is missing and did he do it and if he didn’t do it does our story suggest too strongly that he did do it so we could ruin his life and earn ourselves a big, fat libel lawsuit … that kind of thing.

There is pressure associated with equipment failures that have to be worked around, regardless of whether they can be worked around, because there is only one window of time for the presses to start.

But watching hail destroy a crop, or having to clean up the ripped-apart pieces of what were your chickens before the raccoons struck, or what had been your sheep before the coyotes struck … that kind of helplessness breeds despair.

The closest I have come to experiencing such helplessness occurred twice in 1996. Our basement flooded in January, and again in summer. In January, the water climbed the basement stairway, one step at a time, and we could only sip our coffee and wonder whether it would reach the main floor. Happily, the water in January stopped with two treads left above its level. In the subsequent summer, it stopped with just one stair tread between it and our first floor.

Gardening teaches us a lot about how to use nature to our advantage. But it provides a kindergarten-level lesson in what real farmers learn during each growing season: We are just hitchhiking. We aren’t in control. With skill and luck, we can learn when to ride the days, when to get off and harvest what we can, when to not even think about planting today or cultivating tomorrow.

But in the end, we are as helpless as our seedlings if Mother Nature decides to rip and tear through all our work and expense.

I respect farmers, even admire them. But I don’t have it in me to do more than dabble in gardens, in chickens, in fruit trees.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.