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| Random cornfield and bicycle to rest your eyes on. ;) |
The characteristic feature of farming or gardening, is or at least should be care. If you are not invested in the life of each little plant, at least to some extent, you aren't a farmer or a gardener, just a plant technician.
Many of those who garden, or even farm professionally sometimes, are doing it for reasons that are disconnected from what they are actually doing. The professional farmer farms for money, not food. The ornamental gardener farms for looks, not medicine. The characteristic feature in fact of work and living in the modern world is disconnection. When I buy an Ipod for instance, I am completely disconnected from the way people are living who work in Apple's sweatshops in the Third World, some of whom work 15 hour days for pennies an hour. When I drive my car (which is busted at the moment so I am actually not driving it), I am disconnected from oil spills and tar sands and all the ecological havoc that energy production brings. This is modern, Western, technological culture in a nutshell: it is disconnection.
Millions of people in the US have functionally no living connection with the living soil or life processes beyond their own reproduction. Some children, poor creatures, live out their childhood never knowing about growing things, never so much as sprout a bean seed. I remember vividly, I could not have yet been seven years old, a preschool project where we sprouted a bean seed. I took mine home after the project was over, I loved the little thing, but I had not then the ability to make it live beyond the sprout stage.
I'm funny like that, some things I can remember from before an age when I should be able to. In a world where people are completely cut off from nature, completely cut off from the consequences of their purchases and their waste, cut off from life really, what should we expect but disorder? This is the Age of Ghouls, the age of unreality, the age of disconnection.
However, many of those who work with nature are disconnected too. The vegetable gardener who isn't that concerned whether she gets any vegetables. The corporate farmer who is primarily interested in his balance sheet. The forester thinks about planning lumbering and forest management and not about living trees. The lawn care men who run their smoky two-stroke leafblowers and put poisons on the lawns to make them "pretty". I just heard men running leaf blowers outside and thinking that they might be the folks who work on our lawn (I don't own the house or there wouldn't be any lawn men), I hopped out of my chair to try to interdict them from working in the back yard and cutting down all my lovely weeds. They were working on a completely different house however.
If you don't love the plants, you don't deserve the name of farmer. Real horticulture takes love of the plants themselves. If you do love the plants, you will do what you can to make sure they get a fair deal. Some for you, some for them. Some fruit you take, some fruit you leave on the vine so that the seeds will mature, and the plants will have children next year. No hybrids for me, all open-pollinated. If I didn't let the plants reproduce, I would feel I had cheated them.
But gardening is fraught with difficulties, and one can imagine the anxiety of the subsistence farmer whose children will go hungry if the plants fail. He is connected to his plants with both love and concern. If the plants flourish, he will. If the plants fail, he will. When he transplants his plants from a sheltered window in his home into the soil outdoors, where the winds blow and the rain beats down and the cold may come, their little lives are hanging in the balance, but so is his.This connection of love and concern goes back millennia in some places where subsistence farming is still practiced. The plants and the human family which tends them, each growing on and feeding and feeding on each other, each reproducing new generations that will feed each other and feed on each other and assist each other in moving forward in life. This connection is at the heart of everything I hold valuable, but it is equal parts love and anxiety. You open yourself to care and anxiety if you farm truly.
I won't starve if my little vegetable garden fails, but I feel that connection. My little vegetable garden can have a very substantial effect on my quality of life, and the influx of fresh organic produce will be much welcomed in a diet often short of veggies. I transplanted my first tomatoes and two Asian Astrakom eggplant (both of which I raised from seed) from their little sprouting containers to the big pots today. The tomatoes I will transplant in stages, some now and some later, in case I might be transplanting too soon or adverse weather affects them. The eggplant plants I have a great abundance of, will be trying to give a lot of them away in fact, but the strong tomato plants are in short supply and I have to be very careful with them. The tomatoes are two kinds, roma and a strange purplish product of Soviet plant breeding, the Gypsy. I got the seeds for the Gypsy for free. I no longer know which is which, I am just going to plant whichever ones are strongest.
The transplantation was quite an experience for me in many ways. I made deep holes in the big pots for the tomato plants and carefully cut the sides of their little containers, all the while sort of talking them and myself through it. A rite of passage, for them especially, but for me too. They were taking their biggest step towards a larger world, the place where they would grow and feed the rest of the summer, but as with all big steps the process has danger. There is transplant shock, various pests, and the fact that the nights can still get fairly cool yet. We won't know for sure how we are doing for some days yet. I uttered some prayers to Mother Earth and reassured the plants as to the purpose we are serving in getting them into the big pot, and carefully lowered them into their holes and covered them up to the lower leaves in soil. I already have had some experience with losing plants to the weather or my ineptitude, I lost all my parsley plants and the first crop of my spinach plants to a late sleet. There was a little rainwater about, and I watered close to the plants with the rainwater and spoke to them about what we were doing and going through, and encouraged them.
It was a very prayerful experience for me, this is my religion really. The circles of life, and the Whole in which these circles turn. A faith of dirt and leaf and water and air and sun and worms. I am truly blessed to have had this primal experience of the Earth, because I know it is an experience many people living in cities and living in a mad dash from car to office to car to home don't have. I feel like these are very ancient experiences, at least from the Neolithic, patterns 10,000 years old. Sun and rain and earth and plants and prayers to Mother Earth to look kindly on us both, plant and Man. We are both born, we both feed, we both live, we both die, we are both reborn. In a way, the seed is my child, and I am the seed's child. We feed each other.
I won't starve if my little vegetable garden fails, but I feel that connection. My little vegetable garden can have a very substantial effect on my quality of life, and the influx of fresh organic produce will be much welcomed in a diet often short of veggies. I transplanted my first tomatoes and two Asian Astrakom eggplant (both of which I raised from seed) from their little sprouting containers to the big pots today. The tomatoes I will transplant in stages, some now and some later, in case I might be transplanting too soon or adverse weather affects them. The eggplant plants I have a great abundance of, will be trying to give a lot of them away in fact, but the strong tomato plants are in short supply and I have to be very careful with them. The tomatoes are two kinds, roma and a strange purplish product of Soviet plant breeding, the Gypsy. I got the seeds for the Gypsy for free. I no longer know which is which, I am just going to plant whichever ones are strongest.
The transplantation was quite an experience for me in many ways. I made deep holes in the big pots for the tomato plants and carefully cut the sides of their little containers, all the while sort of talking them and myself through it. A rite of passage, for them especially, but for me too. They were taking their biggest step towards a larger world, the place where they would grow and feed the rest of the summer, but as with all big steps the process has danger. There is transplant shock, various pests, and the fact that the nights can still get fairly cool yet. We won't know for sure how we are doing for some days yet. I uttered some prayers to Mother Earth and reassured the plants as to the purpose we are serving in getting them into the big pot, and carefully lowered them into their holes and covered them up to the lower leaves in soil. I already have had some experience with losing plants to the weather or my ineptitude, I lost all my parsley plants and the first crop of my spinach plants to a late sleet. There was a little rainwater about, and I watered close to the plants with the rainwater and spoke to them about what we were doing and going through, and encouraged them.
It was a very prayerful experience for me, this is my religion really. The circles of life, and the Whole in which these circles turn. A faith of dirt and leaf and water and air and sun and worms. I am truly blessed to have had this primal experience of the Earth, because I know it is an experience many people living in cities and living in a mad dash from car to office to car to home don't have. I feel like these are very ancient experiences, at least from the Neolithic, patterns 10,000 years old. Sun and rain and earth and plants and prayers to Mother Earth to look kindly on us both, plant and Man. We are both born, we both feed, we both live, we both die, we are both reborn. In a way, the seed is my child, and I am the seed's child. We feed each other.
ADDENDUM: I only now humorously realized that if any of my Gypsy tomatoes survived their first transplantation, my tomatoes might be having some funny-looking children. ;) I doubt many of them did, I only planted a few Gypsies to begin with and most from that starter pot didn't make it. If some did make it, and some make it further to get planted in the big pots, there might be some cross pollination going on and hence some future generations of funky-looking purplish roma tomatoes. ;) They might be winners though, so who knows? In any case, the tomatoes which make it to being planted into the big pots will be the strongest of all that I planted, and certainly strength is a virtue in tomato plants. Even if their children turn out funny-looking. A lot of good kids are funny-looking. ;)
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| Gypsy tomatoes from rareseeds.com |
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