I look out of my sunroom (soon-to-be art studio) windows southward, to Vedder Mountain. There’s snow on dem thar hills. If I were to stand on tiptoe, I’m sure I could reach up and touch it, but I don’t want to.
From my vantage place on the second floor, I look down and see my neighbour has rototilled a second patch of the Community Garden. I’m glad to see his enthusiasm carrying on.
We new residents have been dying to stake a claim in the garden so we can begin imagining what we’ll plant when a) we have time b) it’s spring c) we’ve selected seeds from the catalogues.
I had already spread fall rye seed onto the first area he’d dug up. I’ve not ever been a full-scale veggie grower before, but I have learned with other kinds of gardening, not to leave the soil naked and exposed.
After the fact, I asked our experienced Korean gardener what we should have done to get the soil ready for next year’s growing. The soil is only this deep, he gestures with his hands, it needs protecting, not chewing up. He tells me that if we’d burned the grass, instead of tilling, we wouldn’t have disturbed the soil’s microbial system so much, and we’ve have added needed ‘charcoal’ as well.
But not every farmer here agrees with him. Another, says that burning contributes more carbon dioxide to the over-burdened atmosphere. And someone else shakes her head and says the ground was much too wet for tilling.
Ah, well! We do our best with what we have at hand.
I’m thinking that opinions have always varied a lot around growing techniques. Some gardeners use only native species, plant according to the phases of the moon, the Farmer’s Almanac, or how their Dad used to do it. Others use a soil thermometer, intuition, or science. It seems to me, many methods can have success.
The Korean gardener looks at the second lot of cover-crop seeds I’ve spread ... fall rye, winter wheat and peas. ‘All for the birds, this late in the year’, he laughs. There is an old tradition, he tells me. Plant three seeds in each hole ... one for the soil, one for the birds, one for you.
After he’s gone, I look closely at the ground in the garden. The birds haven’t taken more than their share of the scattered seeds (yet). Even though we’ve had some frost and some sleety rain, the peas as well as the grains are germinating.
Can you imagine how a seed wants to grow when it’s so cold?
Nature’s imperative.
We think we know, and we don’t. It’s humbling.
Humbling, like knowing a cougar has been spotted behind the gas station today. And he came this way, through the park next-door and into our back field. There might even have been two, in the far pasture. And if they had cared to, they could have taken one of our children with them. But they didn’t.
How can a cougar come here like that, so brazenly, when all this is ours, and he doesn’t belong?
One of our well-read villagers gives me a fragment of Systems Theory to hold for a moment. Big organisations are like discreet organisms, they have self–protective mechanisms for their own survival, she reports. Like the Big Banks in a financial crisis. Like companies that sell us on a ‘green solution’ of less packaging, but then use advertising to impel us to buy more products, more frequently.
Like Nature, who lets us garden and live in villages, but sends a cougar through on a whim, on the same day the peas are sprouting in cold earth.
So, in the spring, we won’t till when the soil is wet. We’ll burn the grass to add potash. And mulch and deepen the soil so our digging doesn’t disturb the micro-systems. We’ll save on carbon in the atmosphere by not driving to the store to buy vegetables.
We’ll laugh when the birds eat our seeds and feel blessed when a cougar passes through our garden, unnoticed.
