Back to the future with fuel prices?

When I was a kid in the 1960s, most of the people on our block, including my own family, had vegetable gardens that were carefully tended — not out of pride but out of necessity.

Food prices were high enough, and wages were low enough, that the carrots, lettuce, corn, radishes and tomatoes that could be gleaned from a backyard garden helped take the edge off grocery bills.


Moreover, my parents and most of our neighbours always took advantage of the peach and pear orchards that abounded in the Niagara area, buying up quart baskets of the fruit to be canned and put away in the fruit cellar downstairs.

Those peaches tasted wonderful in January.

I don