The Anachronistic Gardener:

I may be an anachronistic gardener, stuck in my own time.

There is evidence.

I'm not taken in much by new gardening products. 

I saw a new product today - a peat pot already pre-planted with a seed, fertilizer included. Just tear off the paper lid and plant the whole thing in the garden and you will have planted the seed.  For $1.25 each.  One of the vegetables offered was bush beans.  You do the math on what it would cost to plant a row of beans using those silly pre-planted peat pots. I'll just tear open a packet of seeds and plant them directly into the ground the old-fashioned way.

I like to read old gardening books. They are charming and have personalities to them. I learn from them.  I enjoy them. They weren't mass produced nor likely widely read.  Each time I open an old gardening book, I'm certain that an old idea, a good idea, will come to light and make me a better gardener.

I'm leery of new, improved varieties of vegetables, generally choosing heirloom varieties if they are offered.  I like to think I'm growing the food my grandparents grew.

I actually garden.  I get my hands dirty, and end up with grass-stained knees and smears of dirt on the front of my shirt and across my forehead.

If all this evidence convicts me of being an anachronistic gardener, someone who seems to cling to the past, so be it. I know no other way to garden and hope to never plant a seed by buying a pre-planted peat pot and shoving it into the ground.

Maybe I'll start a club, a society -- The Loyal Order of Anachronistic Gardeners.

Who wants to join?  We'll buy packets of heirloom seeds to plant the old-fashioned way, and together read the old books to resurrect the old ways of gardening.