Gardener or Farmer?

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The differences between a farm versus a garden and a farmer versus a gardener are very fluid. Ask a hundred different people to distinguish between them and you’ll probably get a hundred different answers. A quick search on the internet for “farming versus gardening” gave me over a million results. There is no easy way to distinguish.

Does size matter? Is it a garden because its only a couple hundred square feet and not a couple hundred acres? Then a mushroom farm would not be farm. Neither would those three acres that make up a specialty herb farm.

Are you a farmer if you make an income and a gardener if you don’t? Well you can have a farm that looses money and a garden that makes money so that definition doesn’t work either.

So many ways to try and make this distinction. How about we look at the topic from the viewpoint of answering the five basic “w” questions to come up with our own distinctions.

Who?

Does it make a difference about who is doing the various steps? On a large farm there are likely to be many people involved in the entire process of growing the food and getting it to the table. The food will probably be planted by one or more people and harvested or picked by others. Somebody else will move that food from the farm to a distribution or processing facility. Then it will be moved again to someplace to be sold by another person, bought by the consumer and then finally arriving in the kitchen. How many people this involves would depend on the particular crop and the scale of the farm.

Small specialty farms, urban farms or community supported agriculture (CSA)farms may not have all these people though. Market garden farms are often run by just a handful of people who are probably all involved in all the steps from seed to consumer, including transportation.

So are you a gardener instead if its only be the members of our household involved, maybe a few friends or family lending a hand at times. Does doing both the planting and harvesting ourselves make us gardeners? Since our food’s entire distribution chain will consist of bringing the food from the garden into the kitchen are we then gardeners?

What?

What we are growing might provide some distinction. Modern farms are notorious for producing large volumes of single crops or maybe a couple different crops if they are ambitious. In the garden you are more likely to have a wide variety of foods. Instead of acres and acres of a single crop, you’ll plant tomatoes, potatoes, kale, raspberries, beets, basil, apple trees, salad greens, etc. Although some farms do have a summer and winter crop, most don’t use the same space for more than one type of plant. In a garden you can plant a fast growing crop and get something else in the same space as soon as you harvest the first one or plant a fall crop of spinach where those peas were earlier this summer. A garden also allows for more varieties of plants. Instead of 500 Roma tomatoes plants you can plant five San Marzano, two Tumbling Tom and a Cherokee purple which all mature at different times.

Where?

Using where to distinguish between a farm and a garden is difficult. Urban farms and market gardens do exist and are increasing in popularity so we can’t say that farms are only in the “country”. Also, community supported agriculture (CSA) farms are likely to be located close to, or even inside, suburban areas or cities.

We tend to think of a garden being associated with your home but some gardens are allotments and are not within sight of your house, or even within walking distance.

Why?

Does the why of growing what you grow make a difference? In a kitchen garden you will likely only grow what you like to eat. You will also grow for your own consumption (well maybe for the neighbors too when those zucchini plants go crazy). You may decide to sell your surplus at the local farmers market but mainly you’ll be growing for yourself and your family. Farms usually grow to sell most, if not all, the product they grow. They may sell to a growers’ cooperative, a wholesaler, a food manufacturer, or direct to consumers like a CSA or market garden but their main goal is to sell it off.

When?

You might think “when” applies only to your growing season but its more than that. Anyone, farmer or gardener, is confined by their local growing season. Yes, you can grow strawberries in February in North Dakota but it will have to be inside a greenhouse.

For the purposes of distinguishing between a farmer and a gardener, I think about the differences in when they plant and when they harvest. Farmers tend to plant all at one time and harvest all at one time. They may need to call in heavy machinery and dozens of field workers at harvest time. Gardeners can more easily space things out. In fact, most times in your kitchen garden you don’t want all your plants maturing at the same time. Although you might want all the Amish paste tomatoes to be ready at the same time so you can put up jars and jars of sauce, other plants its nice to have just a little ready each week. Gardeners can take advantage of succession planting to spread out the harvest and can grow varieties with different maturity dates easier that what is traditionally thought of as a farmer can.

How?

How we grow can show some distinction between gardeners and farmers. Well, okay, only kind of. Mainly the difference is that farming usually makes use of equipment like tractors, plows, seed drills, giant combines and the like. Unless they are a seed farm, or a mushroom farm or a hydroponic farm, or…….Gardening usually just involves simple items like hoes, rakes and snips. This gets a little fuzzy when it comes to urban farms, market gardens and CSAs which may use some small equipment like tillers, hand pushed seed drills and drill powered harvesters.

How also applies to the differences in planting between a farm and garden. Farms plant based on the optimal use of the equipment, usually in rows at a certain spacing which makes planting and maintenance easier. The plants are likely to planted so that it makes it easiest to harvest the most food (either by machine or by hand picking) in the fastest manner. Gardeners don’t need to consider the harvesting in the same way as a farmer. We can take advantage of our hand harvesting to plant in different ways. We can grow in edged or raised beds and containers and don’t have to worry about how we’ll get that tractor in. We can plant in rows or “square-foot” mini plots or plant in high density patterns. We can also inter-plant, having tomatoes trellised with carrots at their base or a “three-sisters” type planting.

Conclusion?

Well, still not easy to define the differences. Not sure that it even matters. Just get growing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a lot of land, a lot of equipment or a lot of manpower to get going. You can grow your own produce without renting a tractor and tilling up the backyard. Use the resources you have (people, space, sunlight, money, etc.) to get some homegrown food on your plate.