"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?" The familiar nursery rhyme popped into my mind as I sat in my River Room and looked out on our beautiful Saranac riverbank. I was clearing my mind in preparation for writing what I hope will be some food for thought.

Our friends know that growing vegetables near our Morrisonville home is an annual affair. In years past, when we had lots of children "at the board," so to speak, the plot was much larger than our current "crop strip."

I recall at least one year when the garden occupied most of the east-side lawn. On another occasion in the '70s, I planted a mammoth plot on the Broadwell farm outside of town.

The motivation for Kaye and me was mostly two-fold. We needed the produce to feed our large family. And we have always considered gardening to be a healthy outdoor exercise.

UGLY GREEN WORMS

Our parents and their parents always had large gardens. Every member of the family had a part in it. For me, most of my reaction to my mother's fixation with Swiss chard was: "Why bother? I'll always hate that stuff."

My mother told us it was full of vitamins, and we ate it or went without our dinner. I could never even get the dog to take it under the table.

Kaye's memory of Swiss chard has to do with the hard work of washing it in three large tubs to clean the sand out before it was cooked and canned. She also remembers that all her siblings took their turn weeding the garden.

I recall my mom giving me a penny for every one of those ugly green worms I picked off her tomato plants and dropped into a can of kerosene.

Kaye remembers the domestic task of snapping the ends of beans, shelling peas and cutting corn off the cobs in preparation for the fall canning marathon.

I've noticed that the frequency of home gardens has ebbed and flowed over the years; but I can safely say that this year, the ebbing is over. There is a tremendous upswing in the number of vegetable gardens this season.

We noticed it at the local garden centers when we tried to buy seeds and seedlings. At some places, they were in very short supply. I bought my seeds early, but others told me they were hard put to find their favorite bush bean seeds in bulk and tomato plant varieties after June 1.

BLOOMING GARDENS

I quizzed my favorite Cornell Cooperative Extension specialists, and they concurred. The home garden business is blooming. I won't go into all the reasons. You are all painfully aware of them, I'm certain.

But some of our own relatives and friends are planting vegetable gardens for the first time, while others are spading up far larger garden plots than in the recent past. Some are even using pots and five-gallon containers to plant what I call "patio gardens." Why not?