The time has come, for us, to assess the waning vegetable garden and start putting it to bed. We should decide to pull all the failing (and flailing) tomato plants give up the last of the cherry tomatoes, the hot peppers (the plants look great but are no longer blooming), the bed of eggplants (which gave us a mere few fruit and many beetles), pick the last of the drying beans on the climbing vines, and feast on the prolific tatsoi still humming along. We have to commit to planting garlic and still try to get seed garlic if we do (they’re great around fruit trees, too, to deter voles, bugs, and deer). And then make a new plan.
The reality is — gardening is hard work. It requires a commitment of time, energy, knowledge, and especially the hand in hand nature of optimism and perseverence. But another reality is — we have to garden for food. We have to. I don’t know what kind of life you live but we’re not always making enough money to buy whatever we want to eat at the store, and food, especially ‘real food’ (how sad that we have to make a distinction) is getting more and more expensive. But with trying to live, eat, and work — the system is not really built to help. And moon-goddess forbid you have anything else going on (like illness, aging, children, disability, education, etc.). Everytime we’ve relied on a system, we’ve lost something valuable (time, sanity, health, imagination, freedom).
Call it bad-planning, bad-life-lessons, resistant subjectivity, or what-have-you but we were never good at ‘careers’ or life plans. When I was young, where I am from — people don’t choose careers or anticipate their futures, they are who they are and they do what comes their way, and they try and make the best of it. The white-middle class upward social mobility directives didn’t come until I was a teenager and my path was already disrupted by then. We don’t sit around and decide to refute this directive, we’re just not built for it, we don’t understand this kind of ‘success’ and can never see how to apply this platform to our lives. We just want to be good human beings. And so, we struggle. We live in struggle. Systems are not really built to help those in struggle but to belittle them and make them feel as if they need to get out of struggle and be ‘successful’. We’re not looking to blame anyone for our shortcomings though we are acknowledging perhaps other folks who understand, and we hope to connect with them. We have been missing the ‘village’ our whole lives, we’re not even sure how it really works but we’re willing to try.
So, when we assess the garden, we have to assess our whole lives. When we have a bounty, we share. We share to our detriment sometimes, because at that moment, we decide that someone else might need it more. Or because it invigorates us to be able to share. And because we’re not planners for an unknown unseen future, we’re pretty tied to the moment. I’m easily distracted from weeding by taking pictures of bees conserving their little fuzzy energies by taking a cool weather nap on a dahlia or by counting witch hazel buds and seedpods. You’ll find the baker tasting apples for flavor profiles, or sewing small books these days, though much of his time is spent taking care of us (he’s always fixing things, cleaning things, or trying to figure out how to make our loose ends meet). And D is the Queen of making art out of nature or cardboard — yes, I wouldn’t trade this ingenuity or imagination for anything but it’s mostly because that is what she has, she is economically inventive. This is the only semi-valuable lesson we can teach. We know it well.
We don’t prefer to struggle. We’re open to new lessons, and try and soak up all we can. But like our derelict garden, reassessment is necessary for new growth and opportunity. Lately, I think, we’ve been relying on a quiet set of systems which aren’t really serving us well. We tried to blend in (yes, this is us blending) and are not necessarily happy with the results. Our garden is not thriving. We’re going back to the integrity of ground to build better.
Rock Bottom Homestead 