Alice Loyd is a senior gardener with 40 consecutive years of raising, preparing and preserving vegetables for health and pleasure.

She has gardened wherever she lived, in soils varying from tubs on city concrete to a new house with scraped clay to deep loam in an older neighborhood. When she lived on a one-acre lot in a Midwestern suburb, most of the property was devoted to plants she raised from seed, including flowers and shrubs as well as vegetables. She also raised food on a patio when living in an apartment complex, and for several years after moving to Raleigh gardened at the homes of friends with sunny yards, sharing space in their gardens.

For 20 years she was the designer and entire work force for a 2000-square foot fenced area where she experimented with most of the vegetables grown in the temperate zone. The garden provided almost everything the family ate during the growing season. She grew enough for the winter, too, employing a number of preservation techniques. Her most recent passion is lactic fermentation, an ancient practice that is returning because it adds rather than subtracts nutrients, and is a low-energy strategy.

Her practical garden knowledge is enhanced by extensive reading that reflects a lifelong passion for agriculture and nutrition as well as home food growing. With many interests and a full work schedule along with family responsibilities, her expertise includes efficient garden-time management.

Wild plants are a feature of all of Alice’s gardens, providing medicines as well as food, beauty and less-visible benefits. These uncultivated life forms have ancestries going back thousands of generations. She believes they support and exchange information with other plants, insects and animals in ways industrialized humans have rarely observed or understood---processes that may be critical to our survival.

The activities of the food-production year for Alice are not work as much as they are an adventure. “I can’t keep from gardening,” she says. “For me, raising, preparing and preserving the food I eat is not an option. It’s just part of being alive.”

At this stage of her life and with today’s mounting ecological problems, passing on to the next generation the joys of food independence has also become a priority.

You may email Alice at foodisthekey@earthlink.net