Some people have screen savers of their kids. I have pictures of a little pond. About a year and a half ago, I started working on my Significant Other to help me create our own private “water feature.” With very little prodding, he signed on for the project.

We spent the winter doing our homework, reading books and surfing the net, determining what plants could thrive in the summer and survive in the winter. We spent early spring agonizing over the myriad choices for mechanical equipment – pump, filtration, UV lighting, etc.

In April, when the ground finally thawed, we were ready to start. We painted an outline in the grass early one morning and starting digging. I wanted to rent a backhoe, but my brother, a professional landscaper, assured me that we could do it by hand. “No big deal,” he said. “You can do it in a day.”

Believe it or not, he was mostly right. By about 5:00 that afternoon, we had roughed in a 2-foot deep pond spanning about 10’ X 15’ in diameter. The next day, we dug one end a little deeper, cut a ledge around the perimeter for the shallow water plants, laid the liner and built a waterfall. The next weekend, we wired all the equipment and filled the pond. We went aquatics shopping the following weekend, bringing the pond to life with fish and vegetation. Soon after, frogs moved in. Lots of frogs, as well as birds and butterflies.

The pond and the surrounding landscape have been an incredibly rewarding project. We have created a living, ever-changing natural habitat that rewards us with a profusion of color, light and motion. A work in progress, the pond matures and evolves with each changing season. It is a source of exercise, a place for reflection and constant reminder of what can be done if you have patience, imagination and a man with a shovel.

It’s a shame our leaders can only tell us to “buy, buy, buy” during an economic downturn (slump, recession, whatever you want to call this). As the price of fuel and food climbs upward, they should be urging us to grow Victory Gardens, pitching in to sustain ourselves and reduce our dependence on industrial methods and foreign fuels. When economic recession coincides with a global climate crisis, it makes even more sense.

When you grow even a small portion of your own food, you reap manifold benefits. You get the satisfaction of reducing your dependence on others for your most basic needs. Vegetables are absolutely the best thing you can eat, and when you grow your own they are cheaper, fresher and tastier. You get to control what fertilizer is used (or not) to grow them, and no petroleum is required to truck them to your kitchen. You get to slow down a bit and maybe connect with your neighbor to swap surplus tomatoes or borrow a shovel. Best of all, you get to be out in the fresh air, using your muscles with a real purpose and not just completing sets of reps. It’s the perfect solution: get in shape while improving your diet.

Michael Pollan makes the point more completely in his essay, Why Bother?:

It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape [i.e., driving ourselves to the gym].

I say we take his advice. Let’s skip the health club this summer and work out in our back yards instead.

(Photo: Flickr - Dr. Hemmert)