A vibrant living thing which feeds us.
Recognizing that the garden is a complex dynamic environment, not a mechanized factory for food production, is a key to a human scaled subsistence farming. Often backyard gardeners in this country seek to emulate commercial production techniques, creating miniature versions of big agriculture, and repeating many of it’s mistakes. The standards of production that we have come to expect are predicated on the practices of an industrialized agriculture that has only been in effect for the last 100 years. Yet through out the long span of post agricultural humanity, people in cooperation with plants, seasons, and available resources have fed themselves and created fuel and fiber.
My operating principle has always been; it can’t be that hard to survive, but the absolutely necessary addendum to this is: if we do the right thing. That may be the hardest thing. Who knows what the right thing is anymore?
Generations of information and wisdom have been lost or set aside as agriculture has progressed and diminished. Left to ‘experts’, the practice of growing has been established and codified as an extractive process. Unfortunately, this is exactly the opposite way nature operates. The additive process of natural production is based on growth, which invariably brings decay. As the cycle repeats endlessly, countless generations of living organisms participate in transforming, recombining, and, adding to the raw materials that sustain everyone and everything on the planet.
With these notions as my foundation, I seek to grow food as intuitively as my modern mind can manage. I defer to no expert opinion, but observe conditions, and approach the problems of pests and nutrients conservatively, mimicking nature with tolerance and adaptation. The results speak for themselves. As we daily, year round, eat fresh food from our garden.
Our garden is large and diverse to guarantee this. Nearly anyone can grow something to eat, but relying on the garden for a constant supply of nutrition necessarily becomes a way of life. There is no separation in nature, a true integration of living and lively hood is a prerequisite for a natural process of living. Acquiring sustenance is an ongoing and necessary challenge that requires a commitment to the process.
The aphorism- ‘The best fertilizer is the farmers shadow‘, exemplifies this principle. The work is not all difficult, but success depends on daily participation, and observation. The cycles of the garden are always churning, there is no beginning or end to the garden, just the process, and the seasons. This can make starting a garden from scratch a challenge, but once the appreciation of cycles is established, a holistic approach develops priorities organically, and the wheel of the year turns evenly.
My year is defined by tasks I take for granted, the seasons of new seeds, the seasons of new soil, the seasons of observant waiting and grooming, the seasons of abundant joyous growth and gathering, and the seasons of rest and recharge.
Timing is one of the most critical components, a plant in it’s proper time, given a decent chance, can’t help but grow. The decent chance consists simply of adequate soil tilth, nutritive material, space, sun, and water.
Tilth is the physical condition of the plant supporting soil assures adequate permeability to the essential elements of air and water, and encourages expansive root development so that the plant may find the resources it needs to grow and completing it’s life cycle, fruit.
Nutrition consists of organic material, anything that has lived, and the biota that supports the break down to it’s molecular components, along with the available minerals in the soil, these are the building blocks of new life.
The space a plant occupies helps determine it’s size, and productivity crowding many plants together diminishes the available sunlight, nutrient base, and capacity of the plants.
Solar exposure, is crucial, the sugars of life are created by the photosynthetic capacity of plants leaves, the fuel for this process is starlight from our nearest and dearest, the sun.
Water keeps it all going, the presence or absence of water determines life spans and the adequacy of the plants purpose. some plants can survive Drought, but all plants need need water to grow, and flourish.
