Lessons from my garden

I planted a vegetable garden again this year. Which should not seem like a big deal. Humans, after all, have been doing that since the era of agriculture began, which, according anthropologists was about 10,000 BCE and, according to the Bible was always. Adam, after all, was a tender of the soil.

But there are three reasons why this IS significant.

1) I have been bitten by the zeitgeist. Food is a hot topic today. Local food, homegrown food, organic food, foraging, food systems, genetically modified food, community gardens, CSAs, farmers markets So it is not surprising, but it is telling, that I planted a vegetable garden this year. It is only my second; the first being last year.

Now, I am not particularly adept at handling potted plants, so why I have been inspired to dig up part of my front lawn and put in two garden plots is a mystery. (And a no-no, for in suburbia, gardens should be tucked away in back yards - but my front lawn, all the way up by the street, is the only place I can put the vegetable garden. I think my neighbors regret not renewing our covenants.)

I am most interested in knowing what historians 50 years from now will say about this latest home-grown rage. We understand the Victory Gardens of World War II - which were said to provide Americans with 40% of their produce during the war years.

What is motivating and catapulting this homegrown movement forward? Distrust in and dislike of the chemical and production procedures of agro-business? Our government's inability to properly supervise the safety of our food? Healing and overcoming our alienation from the land? A desire to reclaim a sense of belonging to place even as we increasingly live in the cyberworld of portable screen technoogies? The desire to witness natural life - its majesty, mystery, rhythms, slowness - even as we live more and more in a quickening world of manufactured things?

Whatever it is, this movement is significant and powerful (especially if it has managed to snare black thumbs like me!), and we should not let it pass without acknowledging it and wondering why.

2) Gardening is a great teacher. I wake up every morning and wonder about the weather. Not so I know how to dress or whether to take an umbrella. Rather, so I will know how to tend to my plants. Will they need watering today? Will they get enough sun? How did they manage in last night's storm?
That is, one of my first thoughts is about something else, something other than me. Jewish tradition teaches us that if you have animals, before eating breakfast, you must go and tend the animals. I don't have animals but I do have my garden. And if I don't tend it first thing in the morning, I may not get to tend to it at all that day. So my first morning task is to tend to my plants.

It is a great spiritual exercise, even a spiritual discipline, to know that upon arising each morning, one of your first tasks is to think about the welfare of something other than yourself. How are they doing, why are they doing this, what do they need, what can you give them, what will it take?

It tends to color your whole day, so that in meetings or chance encounters or when speaking with colleagues and co-workers you find yourself asking, How are they doing? Why are they doing this? What do they need? What can I give them? What will it take?

3) Different gardeners have different attitudes toward "sharing" our harvest with our furry and feathered neighbors. Those who have fruit trees and fruit bushes seem more resigned to sharing their haul with their non-human companions. Often there seems to be enough to go around. Those who labor over vegetable gardens are much less forgiving of their non-human raiders. I lost my garden last year to furry robbers, despite double netting the plants. This year I put up a cloth barrier to try to protect my hard-earned veggies. Time will yet tell if anything survives for my family's consumption.

But either way, it reminds me that we humans must devise ways of sharing this earth. We cannot simply wipe out predators or competitors because they annoy use, like we did with the buffalo, or like we tried to do with the wolves, or weeds, or even insects and others that then created a cascade of food chain degradation that threaten the functioning of the chain of life. What is happening to the bees, the primary pollinators of our fruited food? And the plants surrounding the Round-Up Ready and infused grasses?

Annoying as my local deer and rabbits are, they remind me that accommodation and harmony must exist among all earth's creatures, else we upset the balance, and thus the healthy functioning of life.