Dusting off my Overalls

Winter schminter. Cold, harsh and unwavering. Sobering, heartbreaking and crippling. In just three days, Spring gardening begins for me. I've spent months evaluating past gardens, and calculating what this year's plantings will call for in terms of seed, soil, irrigation, succession and design. I'm feeling ambitious this year, planting enough vegetables to share far more than I could possibly keep or even preserve. I plan to split the excess with close neighbors, donate some to hungry folk, and if there is still some left over, perhaps we'll have a little curbside farmstand. I remain cautious. Mark, however, wanted to lease 16 acres for me this year. What can I say? He loves "Katie's Tomaties" and gets just as excited about the garden as I do. Though I was flattered, I declined this time around.

Gardens hold such promise, and each year, I approach the process not only with a new set of sketches and skill, but with a new set of desired outcomes. This year's mindset has everything to to with prudence and abundance. In a world ridden with crises of all kinds, I find solace in the power of kinship, stewardship and community. And there is great hope in knowing that I am not the only one.

This week, I was reading an essay by Wendell Berry, a self proclaimed mad farmer/writer whom I have held in great esteem ever since reading the words, "Eating is an agricultural act." Furthermore, anyone who can so eloquently make a case for the human and environmental condition by way of Shakespeare and Blake is good in my book. In Life is a Miracle: an Essay Against Modern Superstition, Berry writes, "the standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and communities. We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair" (12).

I spend a great deal of time considering the standards on which my behavior rests, and with every pitch of my fork I am reminded of the world in which I am participating. When I consider this with any seriousness, I get angry and I pitch harder. But after several turns (and fits of rage), all of that pitching and turning results in rich compost. It will get spread around, feed the soil and eventually become food to be shared with my community and kin. On Friday morning, when my pepper seeds are sown, I'm invoking an end to the Winter of our discontent.