Wishful Thinking: A Key Ingredient for Gardening

This year I had planted a few heirloom varieties of our favorite vegetable. Sometimes there are good reasons as to why plants today are different from how they were for distant relatives. Those potatoes, for example, had been bitter and nearly inedible for most of those thousands of years. In fact, every time I had a plate of french fries or a big baked potato for dinner, I paused to think those cultivators of your for their persistence. After so many generations of work on the plant, they must have at least considered throwing in the towel but didn't.