I grew up on a farm in the loess hills of northwest Missouri where the river bottoms and tillable hillsides were covered in rows of corn, milo, soybeans and winter wheat. For recreation on a Sunday afternoon, my family would get in the car and drive around the countryside, a diversion made possible by the New Deal farmer-to-market roads. My father had tried farming his father’s land after a stint in the Army in World War II, but the economics just weren’t there on a hundred acres, even in the early 60s, so he eventually ended up selling chemical fertilizers and pesticides at our town’s new “fertilizer plant.” As we passed farms on our Sunday tour, Dad would point out the field and recite what fertilizers and pesticides had been applied. Most times, the field would be a source of pride for my dad and its owner: straight rows; not a weed in sight; deep green color. To someone who grew up around tractors and harrows, such a field was as pleasant a site as “Amen Corner” at Augusta National on Master’s weekend.
Those aesthetic and ecological values went with me when I left the farm to go to college in the northeast. In a public speaking class, I even delivered a heartfelt apologia for “modern” farming practices that were rapidly replacing older, more natural techniques like spreading manure and letting fields lie fallow in the same way that tractors had replaced draft horses a generation earlier. After all, American farmers were feeding the world, and the wonders of science had made that extraordinary feat possible.
You can take the boy off the farm, but it’s hard to take the farm out of the boy. With the college, law school and wedding check boxes clicked, my spouse and I found ourselves living in an old adobe ranch house in the high plains with a view of the Sangre de Cristos. We wouldn’t have been surprised to see the Lone Ranger and Tonto pop up over a ridge at any moment.
There was an incredible garden spot that had been developed the old-fashioned way with hand labor and manure, and it sat underneath the local irrigation ditch. Our majordomo informed us that we could irrigate that garden any time the water was flowing. Just don’t take all the water out of consideration for the downstream users. Now the rows weren’t that straight, but you can tell by the color how rich the soil was. And ditch irrigation was fun, like building dams on creeks like when I was a boy.
More than three decades and many gardens later, we found ourselves in a bleak, urban setting in a Rust Belt city. The good news was that the lot with two abandoned houses cost $3,500. The bad news was that it looked
like the picture on the right. You can see the remnants of a cedar shrub whose roots were pushing on the foundation and branches blocking a doorway. What you can’t see because it’s covered by a light snow is the mud interspersed with clumps of goose grass and lambs quarters that comprised the side yard.
Still the farmer, I was ready to start a garden our first full summer. Taking some tongue-and-groove we had to remove from a ceiling and refashioning it with a table saw, we built a picket fence around this area to keep the dogs out. (We also quit parking our old Olds here behind a stockade gate with the result that it was stolen twice.) More salvaged lumber was used to make shallow beds, and we bought dirt in bags and poured the Miracle Gro to it.
It was wonderful to have homegrown tomatoes again along with lettuce and green beans, but there were deeper emotional, even spiritual benefits. We were living in tough circumstances. At this stage, the houses were little more than barns. Not only was there no insulation anywhere, but the large house didn’t even have drywall or plaster and lathe. It had been removed by someone else years before as the first step in an aborted rehab process so we used black plastic sheeting for room privacy until the dry wall went up. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer and hard on the eyes year round. To have things growing and blooming and producing food on the premises was a part of a larger process of making something unlivable and ugly into something comfortable and aesthetically pleasing.
The next two years saw us expand our gardening efforts to the front and back yards. Out went the goose grass and a bunch of mulberry sprouts that completely shaded the mudhole otherwise known as the back yard. In went beds and new dirt. The result was more tomatoes with lots of San Marzanos for canning sauce, more green beans for freezing and plenty of lettuce to give away to neighbors. By then, however, the original “middle garden” had begun to decline in output. Bugs were a problem, and the tomatoes began to suffer from some diseases. I needed to reassess what we were doing.
A new garden philosophy was beginning to emerge within my farmboy mind. The emphasis shifted from annual vegetable crops grown in rectangular beds to perennials and biennials that provided multiple benefits. I committed to ditching the Miracle Gro, started a compost pile and found sources of rabbit manure that I could pick up and haul home for the cost of gas. We started growing comfrey and stinging nettle to provide nutritious, organic teas for our plants. A used book store provided some inexpensive encyclopedic books on medicinal and culinary herbs. And while I had never used pesticides on any garden, my focus shifted from getting rid of bugs to providing a healthy environment where the bugs could flourish alongside the plants.
The last step was eliminating my attachment to rows and weedless, monocropped patches. I learned that row fixation was more than an aesthetic preference inculcated by my upbringing. Those weedless rows were a testament to who was boss: man or nature. A lack of order proclaimed that man was losing to nature, and I, indeed most of us, wanted no part of losing to anything or anyone. After all, it was human destiny to conquer nature and bend it to our will, wasn’t it?
Wendell Berry is a poet and Kentucky farmer who has written frequently about the relationship between humans and the world of which they are part. He put my new philosophy more succinctly and eloquently than I could:
We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House.
One way Berry’s great truth has dawned on me is by growing my plants from seed rather than buying them at a nursery. Growing from seed imparts knowledge of what a plant looks like right after it emerges from the ground, and that knowledge has allowed me to grow a number of plants that are adept at self-seeding. Since I now recognize chamomile or bachelor button or borage or horehound or dill or coriander seedlings, I can let these plants grow in the spring while weeding out the plants I don’t want. That’s led to some interesting plant migrations as the borage reseeds itself five yards away from where it was originally planted to a space where it flourishes because of better light or the chamomile emigrates from the middle garden to the back garden just because it wanted a different view (?). Yes, I’m still making choices and exerting some control over the space, but the plants are no longer passive objects but active participants in the process. And self-seeding doesn’t result in nice straight rows either, and the catnip might be intermixed with the pennyroyal or the columbine might push up against the absinthe a little.
And I’m cool with that. So are the bees and butterflies and birds that hang out at our place now.
Is what’s good for the world also good for us? If we can let loose of our arrogance and insecurity, that odd but omnipresent couple, so that we can both quit believing we know enough to control our environment and stop fearing what a loss of control will bring, life can become more about harmony than struggle. All it takes is a little humility:
“Bend and you will be whole.
Curl and you will be straight.
Keep empty and you will be filled.
Grow old and you will be renewed.
Have little and you will gain.
Have much and you will be confused.”
Tao teh Ching, Wu trans.
What is good for us? We often speak about living in harmony with nature, and that’s a fine metaphor. I’ve done a fair bit of singing in harmony, and it can be absolutely spine-tingling to be in a group that not only knows the notes but listens to one another so that we almost subconsciously blend our voices to make a beautiful one out of many. But my favorite way of understanding peace and my destiny is to think of being in rhythm with the world around us. While each of us can be playing our own individual riff, underlying it all is a cosmic beat. If we’re attuned to that as we carry on our own little improvisations, the result will be something you can dance to.
Now a few more recent pics of our place along with a YouTube clip featuring one of my favorite philosophers, Maude of “Harold and Maude.”