Henry’s Tree: A Story for Samhain

October 28th, 2011

Maple tree.

Today they came for Henry’s old Maple tree.  I knew they would; it has been in decline since Henry died nearly a decade ago.

The trunk, blackened when sap ran and dust gathered, challenged the sky and a few brilliantly orange leaves showed us what Maples do best. But the tree was ready to pass.

When we moved to his place in 1996, Henry was one of three neighbors who had served in the Second World War. He’d flown as a crewman in C-47 cargo planes over “The Hump,” that quaint name for the Himalayas that separated British India from the land war raging in China. He did not regale me with heroic stories. He was an enlisted man and did his part, never firing a weapon but always finding himself “in harm’s way” as the Allies did their best to help China in her fight against Imperial Japan.

Henry had lost his wife some time before we arrived, and he could come to tears over her, years later. I think he planted the tree for her, or at least they had enjoyed time there together. Henry had done all in his power to make the modest bungalow ready for her widow’s years. He’d put siding on, replaced the house’s roof and HVAC, even run a driveway through the backyard and beneath that tree, so she could walk right in as her health declined.

But, as a indifferent universe often does to us, things turned out differently.

I was pleased to have Henry as a neighbor, and in a few small ways, I know I cheered up his final years. He often fretted about his tree. Squirrels, hungry in early spring weather, would nibble the buds and the Maple would bleed. I assured Henry this would not harm it unless it happened year after year.

As our climate warmed, it happened more often than not, with the Maple erupting with buds before other foods were there for our squirrel population.  But then, Henry did not live to see that. I’m glad of that small comfort in a difficult world.

I’ll miss the tree as much as I miss Henry. They went together in my mind.

Sometimes at this time of year, when the Veil between us and our ancestors thins, I would imagine the old man, leaning on his cane and beside his Buick LeSabre, under the Maple. It was a characteristic pose of his, as soon as he left the car. He’d be looking up.

Waiting for something I could not see.

Image Credit: Creative-Commons licensed image by BurningQuestion at Flickr.

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Summer’s Abundance

September 19th, 2011

Rows of canning jarsThe sound of the cicadas waned, then vanished. With it we moved from the surety of a sticky summer to the time of year when the veil between our world and what lies beyond seems to thin. Even to a Deist like me, who does not believe that the Creator mingles in our affairs, it seems plausible that those beyond that veil might whisper more loudly now, as the seasons shift.

They often whisper “get ready.”

We take our abundance for granted, be it the well-stocked grocery shelves or the ability to make a phone call and have pizza, Chinese food, and more appear at our doorsteps.  Our ancestors did not, and I don’t believe our descendents will, either.  So every year, in a time when we have so much that the garden can seem to overwhelm, I focus on what I did well to prepare myself for the coming time of dearth.

“Dearth” sounds like “Death,” or at least his first cousin.  Imagine stony-cold long months when a pantry, root cellar, and perhaps some wild game, are all one has to sustain life and limb.  For that reason I began to can some of my harvest: I fear such times of dearth will come again, and if not, I’d like to be as self-reliant as I can.

This year, I took no great steps beyond being part of a community garden. Our harvest was better, since with some careful planning and a lot of chicken-wire, I harvested enough tomatoes to can them as sauce. Then, when summer was burying us in vegetables, I put up another 20 pounds of tomatoes purchased from a local grower for a measly $10.

This harvest season, I gathered up a few more herbs to dry than I did in past years when, to be honest, my gardening practices waned a bit. Perhaps it was the coming of another hurricane to these parts, or perhaps merely my running low on oregano last winter. Either way, I do not plan to let summer’s wild abundance pass me by again.

“But the store sells oregano. It even sells food,” I have heard others say. Whatever the nutritional value, or lack of it, of such food, looking into a home-stocked pantry is also a joy. Growing it oneself teaches vigilance; I become easily concerned about the winter squash not canned but put away in the dark to provide food in the deepest months of what passes for winter here. I check them for mold frequently.

Next year, I’ll take a next step further, experimenting with solar food-dryers to preserve more of the harvest in energy-efficient ways. Will I ever live off my own garden? Probably not. But even small steps are steps, and I wonder–fret, really–about those who have not even begun.

“I have no time,” colleagues and some friends say.  I should reply “yes, but you may have less time than you think.”

If a reader didn’t do much planning and harvesting this year, remember: next year you have another chance. Seize it.

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Restoration: That Fourth R

June 16th, 2011

A turning of life’s wheel coincides this year with the turn of the Wheel of the Year. Fern and I have been working hard on her family’s rural property, and for the first time in a few years, we are far enough along to actually sit back and enjoy the goings on as the land readies itself for summer.

Much hard work of restoration remains, inside the old house and on the many wooded and open acres around it. But it’s starting to look more like a farm-in-the-making and less like a construction site. For the first time, ever, I noted a “gentleness” to the land in full flower. Many of the scars have vanished, left from necessarily hasty work done over the past ten years. But at that time, some haste was needed to maintain old roads and verges of the woods. Now, another pace of work takes hold and it feels better. At the creek, the riparian zone I established by mowing further from the edge is coming in with gusto.

This local act of restoration calls to mind larger ones worth undertaking. I cannot, and each reader cannot, fix our nation’s and planet’s many problems alone. But when working on larger causes, the energy gained by personal restorations may be transformative.

Transformation of a space, sacred or mundane, can influence others to try the same. I see this in gardens all the time. I’ve a great plot in a community garden, given the shady conditions in the yard the the inability to be present at the rural land long enough to fend off “the critters.” I often walk to this garden near work after my lunch, and this year the serious gardeners have come in. Last year, the heat and humidity made the faint-hearts quit, and the weeds rushed in like a marauding army.

This season, however, the fair-weather souls lost their spots, and several families have created delightful and productive spots for vegetables and annual herbs. Walkers come by and remark how the bit of wasteland has been saved. I know a few of them will go home and tend a sunny bit of their properties differently. Our little garden is a silent model for what the world could, with some care and effort, look like.

I’ll end with a tale of an old bicycle. It was mine as a kid, and when I moved the old Schwinn Cruiser went to a friend who rode, then neglected, it. Eventually the shed where it rested was taken down, and my old bike got leaned against a fence until the weeds and vines had it. The owner, too overweight to contemplate cycling, stays inside and looks at a computer monitor or television screen.  That, sadly, is too much of our nation.

Two weeks ago, I got permission to cut the vines and reclaim the bike. Only the wheels and handlebars were too gone to reuse. Rust was light on everything except the the rusted-solid chain, but after a bath in a weak solution of Oxalic Acid, even the chain came clean and awaits a good ride. The old seat, with some leather conditioner, looks new again. I’ve sanded, primed, and repainted the frame and it will wear a set of vintage decals soon.  All I need is a basket, and the old bike will rekindle some very fond memories when I ride it. I only worry that my commuter bike, ridden most days to work, will be jealous!

I wonder if our lives, hurry-scurrying and always interrupted, are not like the old bike or the neglected garden. The act of restoration in such cases might just inspire larger acts to make oneself calmer, deeper, and whole.

Try it. Start with a few plants or maybe an old bicycle.

Happy gardening and may the rain fall gently but plentifully on your piece of earth.

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The Rubble of Spring

March 17th, 2011

After Winter turned mild in late January, my thoughts were already turning to Spring. If climate change is inevitable, what better way to use a milder winter than to begin some early planning and start some seeds?

Then, amid that forced bit of optimism, the news from Japan swept over us.  The reactors leak and I probably speak for most when I say how utterly beyond our power it seems, at the moment I write this, to set things to rights again.

There is not only a lesson in Spring for us here, but in what the season does. I held off starting seeds a bit longer this year, in order to do other work in the garden and at the farm that suits late Winter. Before sap rises in many trees, and before the snakes start crawling into and from most thickets, this is the time for pathwork, both the inner journey to chart the year ahead and the hard physical work of moving stones, clearing pines from roadsides, limbing trees to help bring in sunlight or remove rubbing branches. We’ve probably cut over 100 small pines since the first of the year, all of them so thickly clustering at the fields’ edges that I’m reminded of an invading army, all lined up at attention and waiting for the marching order to reclaim a clearing.

It is no easy task to keep these invaders at bay, but they are merely responding to their evolutionary impulses to colonize open space, in a part of North America that cannot tolerate prairie. My goal is simple: field edges with lots of hardwoods and hard-to-topple specimens such as hemlocks or Red Cedar. As I work these thickets, selecting pines to remove, I find all sorts of debris from the land’s prior tenants:  metal buckets so corroded that they are as delicate as lace, old 55-gallon drums with some life left in them, strands of wire dangerous underfoot and ruinous to a saw’s chain, bits and pieces of rust-caked machinery.  I also find rubble: broken cinder blocks, brickbats, chunks of mortar from long-demolished masonry projects or, in the case of some bricks, the plantation that existed on the land in slavery times.

That always takes me aback; the bricks have a story to tell, as do the more recent artifacts. The rusty metal goes to the recycling bins at the local transfer station, but with the rubble there is a new chapter coming in its history. My last column noted how the broken mortar of farmwork ends up filling potholes. Now I take larger materials and tamp it into the clay I’ve leveled beside the barn, where a new tractor run-in is taking shape. The debris will form a more sold footing for the gravel, several tons of it, coming to level the area so large machinery can sit there dry and clean, out of the weather.

There’s a long tradition of civilizations building atop the rubble of their predecessors, predecessors both wise and foolish, fortunate and doomed. Under still standing Roman ruins in Italy, I’m sure one would find fragments of Etruscan stone and ceramics, used as footings for old walls or filler between runs of Roman brick. In Istanbul’s Basilica Cistern, Medusa-headed capitols from ancient pagan temples became the drowned foundations for new columns. It was an “up yours” moment of sorts for the Christians of the early Byzantine era, to whom pagan practices were not so long perished.

As I bury the bricks of slave-holders, I think  that their fate is similar: upon their wasted bones I’ll make a farm one day.  An irony of all this is the house that remains; I sleep there where the county’s first freed slave, a blacksmith who purchased his freedom, made a house for  his family. I’ll never know his name, but this Spring, as the house nears completion, I hope his spirit looks down and knows that in my small way, here in writing and with my hands on the land he once purchased from his former masters, I honor his memory.

Good thoughts for a troubled spring when the earth and sea ravaged Japan and made more rubble than I want to contemplate. Some may linger down many centuries as an invisible but lethal warning to those who come after.

But even there, as in the ancient world or on the farm, the rubble will be leveled and new life will come again to blasted places.  Earth abides.

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Broken Bricks & Seed Catalogs

January 11th, 2011

Pulling the thoughts together for this post will prove as interesting as sorting through the piles of seed catalogs that arrive, dutifully, in the mail in the second week of January. In light of the tragic events in Arizona, I need to do some sorting. We all do.

This time of year, in my spiritual practice, I call “Seed Time.” Soon I’ll be starting those seeds for spring and summer; just before the last dusting of snow, I went out to my employer’s community garden and checked our plot. Grass that had come up in the straw ended up in a composting heap. I cleaned up a lot of it, spread straw on the frozen soil, and watched a stupid and overly large machine nearby prepare the golf course for the annual rites of folly. To the credit of the golf course, I realized that they plant Zoysiagrass, one of the few sustainable choices for an Astroturf-perfect lawn.  If it did not turn brown in the winter, I imagine that more grass-fanatics would plant Zoysiagrass.

Despite that wise concession by the country club, I ended up contrasting my sustainable practice with the patently unsustainable idea of golf as we practice it.  The idea of golf, I’ll add, actually is appealing: a walk (no cart!) across open land, the meditative pursuit of perfect drives and putts. Yet the reality of the sport in the States is abhorrent in terms of chemicals, water usage, and oil consumption. Meanwhile, as our oil supply slips permanently and the culture of suburbia ebbs slowly into villages and ruins, I’ll keep thinking about the seeds I need to plant for the next season.

A key to my spiritual gardening has been the reuse of every thing I can. That brings me to the broken bricks of my title. At our farm-in-the-making, I’ve run across so many chunks of brick and masonry that, in town, would go to the landfill. Instead, I put on safety glasses, put the big bits into a bucket, and whack them with a one-handed sledge hammer until I have large rubble. These buckets go into the potholes on our unpaved road. I suppose that I’ve dumped 1000 lbs of it by now (a surprisingly small amount of stone!). Still, the pickup wants to sink even when riding on snow-and-mud tires.

The realization of how little need go to the landfill–other than metal I recycle or sell, and trash that I cannot compost–was another sort of “seed” that led me to the idea of Sacred Gardening. Thus even the act of breaking stone becomes sacred, just as is planting a seed. Both are conscious acts aimed to reduce the load of the Good Earth as well as her hidden treasures like oil and coal, air and water.

I’ve read recently, in a review of Bill Bryson’s book At Home: A Short History of Private Life, that the author discusses how in the Middle Ages, the discovery of making good brick revolutionized social life. Second stories could be added to homes that had chimney, instead of keeping open fires in the middle room. Thus began not only an “upstairs/downstairs” social division but also the idea of privacy.

Fascinating stuff, but I kept saying to myself “wait a minute! I’ve seen Roman and Byzantine brick that dates from before 500 AD and still looks great!” The photo at the start of the post, an aqueduct at Merida Spain, provides proof that the secrets of making good brick were lost in much of Europe for many centuries. Yet the Romans got it right: the spacers between the large stones of much Roman work was brick, and if those crumbled, down came the arch.

I do not think that we’ll soon lose the ability to make bricks, but I wonder about practices, such as starting plants from seed and tending them, that too few American gardeners possess. It’s so easy to buy from the greenhouse or discount store. I do it. You probably do, too. Yet the act of starting from seed, like making a good brick, is an act of faith.  The first green shoot, or the first brick in a course, is a type of magic, an intention-setting.

So let’s challenge ourselves. Shortly after Imbolc, a festival of making and recognizing returning light, start some seeds.

Tend them well in winter’s remnants, until they bring forth new life.  Thus, you’ve learned a key skill, one that could stave of the Horseman of Famine.

No small miracle, that. Like making good brick, one could build, or rebuild, a civilization on such a foundation. Ours lies in political and economic ruins, as a plutocracy runs our system. The system will fail, as all unsustainable ventures do. Will we have the brick, and seed, we will need to rebuild something better? I think so, but we must start now and teach others.

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First Snow & Old Memories

December 6th, 2010

Winter WoodsIf you are of a certain age, you may remember the pilot episode for The Waltons, a 1971 made-for-TV film called The Homecoming. I recall one scene well, where John Walton tries to get back to the family during a snowstorm. One shot, from behind of an automobile on an unpaved road at night, with the snow falling thickly, stuck with me as emblematic of all those who try to travel home in difficult weather.

Sometimes it seems that our tightly wound society blows up the storms. These are so different from the trials, and solace, to be found in the natural world.

The other night, the first real snowfall of the year happened at our farm. We’ve a four-wheel-drive vehicle, not a Model T, so we could actually drive to town for a pizza in a snowstorm; how the world has changed since the 1930s.  As I walked to unlock the farm gate, through quickly falling snow and toward the tail-lights of the waiting car, however, the moment seemed as timeless as the moment from The Homecoming. The snow was just deep enough to make that crunching noise underfoot, a sound that makes lovers of winter like me rejoice.

The woods were very quiet as the snow fell heavily. Had the day been colder, we’d have had a full inch by the time we returned home.But the circularity of the season’s chores could not have been more perfect. Just before the first flakes sifted down, I’d finished my year of mowing, cutting a lower field we want to keep open against the day when the farm is a working farm again.  Now the old tractor will wear a blade for scraping the unpaved and difficult driveway through the woods to the farmstead.

I hoped for a deep fall of snow, knowing we’d get very little. To my pleasant surprise, we ended up with a heavy dusting that did not fully melt the next day, a reminder that one day, in spite of what our foolish species does to the ecosystem, the world will end in cold, after the sun expands to engulf Mother Earth, then shrinks to a small red dot, an ever-cooling cinder out on the fringes of the Milky Way.

It can be solace enough to know that one lives in less dire times; while our species does its best to end winter in these latitudes, the Old Man of the North is with us still for at least a few more decades.

To be honest, I was too cold to think such thoughts as I made my way to open the farm’s gate. It was enough to have a meal, then the company of others on a cold, dark, night.

The next morning, the snowy woods were waiting and work needed to be done. I shattered the stillness with the roar of a chainsaw, then cleared snags and made piles of brush. That will all soon be chipped, to pile over large limbs and branches from several fallen pines that fill a couple of sink holes.  The thick pile of chips will generate heat and break down the larger pieces of wood, accelerating a process that can take a long time, especially after the prior winter’s snows left dozens of very large pines hung up among other trees. This process turned a stately second-growth forest into a tangled mess of creepers, bent living trees, and dead trunks. As they get closer to earth, I’ll help them in their journey back to soil.

Very much as gardener of this huge garden, I began to cut, roll, stack, and sort the blowdowns I could safely clear.  The pine from most of the downed trees isn’t straight enough for boards. What does not go to our outdoor fire pit either goes back to lie flat in the woods, to rot and enrich the soil. As I worked, I cleared way for beeches and oaks that are coming in the wake of the colonist pines. The pines have done their part,  reforesting land that had, decades back, been completely cleared. Tulip-poplars came in not long afterward, and there I have a woodsman’s bonanza: a huge tree that lost its top in a violent storm but retained 30 feet of perfectly straight trunk. With a portable sawmill we’ll cut boards to kiln-dry. Eventually, the lumber will be bookshelves and cabinets.

Working in cold and silent woods makes one very aware of the pulse of life in one’s own body. The life-heat that sustains us, the ability of the human body to do very hard work and feel better for the experience, the sense of a homecoming to rural land. At times managing tens of wooded acres seems overwhelming, but modern tools and a community of neighbors can make it easier.  We hire a local builder who is a Hamner; yes, kin to Earl Hamner, the real life John-Boy Walton  whose fiction inspired lots of us to want to live more simply in difficult and confusing times.

But tools and even a Walton connection do not suffice in every case. My best ally remains a very ancient sense of working with, and not against, the land. This provides the strength to continue on any journey, even one through the shortening days and the snows of what may be a long winter.

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The Cosmic Neighborhood, Darkness, & Us

November 9th, 2010

I have been under dark night skies, far from city lights & their spectral pollution, quite often in the last several months. Time on the farm includes both hard work of a sort many of my fellow citizens could not stomach, but it also provides restful moments of complete transcendence.

One glimpse of the Milky Way, arching above our heads on a clear and moonless night, cures any sense of hubris. It should be required viewing. An image shown above, copyright 2009 by Miloslav Druckmüller of the Czech Republic, is a composite of 58 photos taken with great effort in the mountains of Chile. It shows what we might see if our eyes were a bit better and the sky not ruined by our so-called improvements.

Darkness is not absolute, except far below the ground. Despite the losses we feel, much goodness remains and we need to cultivate endurance when plenty does not come our way. This time of year, when the last plants in the garden feel the first nip of frost (and Collard Greens are sweeter for it; harvest them soon) it’s time to check the larder one last time. With luck, there may be a few local vegetables for sale, at least pumpkin and other winter squash to store against what were once, and may be again, very hard months of winter. There was a time when no help would come with the swipe of debit card at the market; the market was one’s one garden and that of the small community nearby. As you all know if you know me, I think that with the waning of cheap fossil fuels those times would come again.

As the Milky Way shines down on the farm, I consider the idea that we humans are special in any way. I’m a Deist, so I don’t sense any healing or helping presence in that immensity beyond all reckoning. Whatever spun the galaxies did its work, praise be to it, and we are now responsible for the small gardens we tend on this ball of rock flung headlong in its unending circle around our star, a tiny one in that final sea billions of light-years deep. It makes human concerns and infighting worse than insignificant: it makes such strife ridiculous.

It also makes humans special: we are gardeners, wardens, keepers. It’s our world, not some capricious god’s.

If we are different from our fellow animals, it’s that we can find beauty in that blanket of stars above us.  Go out and find it and count the blessings of a well stocked pantry and bowl of autumnal stew. They can be recompense enough in a time of illogic and anger that suddenly become puny against the cold skies and bright heavens of winter.

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Of Okra and Old Men

October 11th, 2010

Okra Pod
Creative-Commons image courtesy of Smashn Time at Flickr

It was one of those vexing days that we see more of, as the election approaches and the voices of rage and intolerance gain strength. I found my voice, and found it well, when after an idle comment in a local hardware store, a thus-far helpful employee made a quip about theft by “dark complected” people.

“I’m dark complected,” I said. “Of Arab origin, in fact. Do you mean African Americans? One of my cousins married one.”

The old man got flustered, but he managed to spurt out “No, I mean Mexicans.”

I am sure my eyes bulged, as Lebanese men are wont to do when they get really angry. I found my voice.

“Señor, hablo Español.  ¿Porque tienes problemas con los hispanohablantes?”

At this he got redder still. He could only muster a sorry laugh and he put his hand on my shoulder.

I flinched away like a snake had struck. “Show me where the sandpaper is and be more careful when you talk about someone’s skin.”

I left the store, thinking maybe I should talk to the manager, but the day is late for men like him. He’s over 65, working part-time to earn some income, and he’ll pass from this earth with only an election or two more in him.  So be it.

My next stop was the community garden I’ve written about in this space before. It has thrived despite a renewal of the dry weather.  The okra plants in a neighbor’s long-neglected plot have gone to seed, and the seed pods are wonderfully withered things with a certain dignity. I snipped as many as I could. I’ll use some for plants next year and others for decor.

The pods reminded me of the old man. Like him, they retain the shape of their former existence. He longs for a time before, I suppose, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the defection of LBJ from resistance to progress. In a nation with a black president, he can only exercise his clotted hate in the aisle between the contact paper and the hand tools.

Would that all haters were so toothless.

At least the okra will bear fruit next year. Of course, that’s my worry about the old man, too.

To cleanse myself, I did something I rarely do outdoors: I took off my shoes and went barefoot into the garden. The straw around the plants was cool underfoot as I stooped to weed, thanking the Goddess of the Good Earth that the dew has been heavy as the rains subsided once again. I only had to water a bit, and the late peppers and even a few tomatoes were waiting there for me.

Not a bad late harvest, even as Fall comes on with the certainty of growing darkness. But it will pass, too.

And I’m saving my seeds for that happy time.

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The Lawn: Our “Little Shop of Horrors”

September 22nd, 2010

We are suffering another drought in the Mid-Atlantic states and, as usual, the fickle fescue and babied bluegrass that home-owners insist on planting has died. Again. Companies are hired, for thousands of dollars, to rip out a dead lawn, then prepare a seed bed for another. Exhaust spews, fertilizers and weed killers spray, water gushes, runoff goes into our rivers and the Chesapeake.

Sometimes the turf is simply rolled out like carpet onto bare ground.

I’m certain that in a few years, this practice will stop; there is not enough ground water and, soon, oil to support a monoculture that can be as fussier than any plant in the landscape.

All of the ritual of the Mid-Atlantic Lawn reminds me of Little Shop of Horrors, as envisioned in the second film of that name. In it, Rick Moranis’ and Ellen Greene’s characters have this shared fantasy set to the song “Someplace Green,” featuring a suburban cottage and a lawn that looks like AstroTurf. Moranis, a pot-bellied pater familias of suburbia, pushes a mower over grass that is perfect and sterile.

Of course, he and his girlfriend are eaten by a very different plant, “Audrey.”  Have American lawn-fetishists created their own version of Audrey, murmuring “feed me” every time they step outside? Our lawns need a steady diet of fertilizers, derived with heavy inputs of fossil fuels, water, and precious time. All for something to fool us into thinking that we are English gentry, when the time could be better spent on growing something we could eat.

As the era of the lawn ends, some who make a fetish of perfect green grass might try synthetic grass instead. As long as it is permeable to rainfall, I honestly think fake grass could be less environmentally destructive than what we now call a “lawn.”

But plastic grass won’t last one year into the era of Peak Oil.

Yet as this bit of the American Dream recedes along with cheap gas, drivable suburbia, and 3000-miles-to-table food, perhaps we can begin to re-seed?  Perhaps new ideas, and some very old ones, will come back to the fore in a coming era of scarcity?

Instead, imagine a few things that can be done now:

  • Put in a garden. Even in the front yard. If the fascists in your neighborhood association prohibit it, mulch the lawn to protect trees and other carbon-abating plants that do not need so much care. Plant other understory plants and ornamentals that are drought tolerant in your new front garden near your trees. Then move to a sane place before Peak Oil’s effects put an end to covenants and, most likely, the neighborhoods they “protect” become slums.
  • Embrace Wire Grass. It’s a non-native grass that laughs at droughts. It grows everywhere.  You’ll find it a pain to pull from flower beds, but after the ground gets damp, pulling it up is easy.
  • Try Zoisa, another good choice, even if it turns brown in winter. Still, the grass crowds out weeds without chemicals and, in its non-dormant season, no golf fairway looks so perfect.
  • Set up Rain Barrels. We did this and have nearly 200 gallons of water ready after even a modest thundershower.  You’ll not sustain a lawn with it, but you’ll have plenty of water for plants that matter. The water is not safe to drink, and be sure to add some mosquito dunks (non toxic to animals and plants, by the way). Most home-improvement stores and garden shops carry them.

This region was never meant to have anything like the modern lawn.  And soon it won’t, except for the very rich who have a private water supply. Why not get ready now and stop feeding Audrey?

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Gardens & Golf Courses

August 30th, 2010

Garden FenceWe’d just about given up on our country garden, so ravaged by “critters” this year, in spite of my sending one ground-hog to its maker.  The weeds can have it, except for a tiny plot that is still pumping out jalapeños. It’s just not worth gardening a spot you cannot sufficiently fence and watch, even when you’ve conquered the rainwater problem with a good rain-barrel system.

So we began to seek a spot to grow vegetables closer to our home. Home would be the ideal place, of course, but it lacks the eight hours of direct sun that’s a minimum for vegetables.  It can support herbs and flowers; that’s enough for now, at least. Then, as fate had it, my employer came through with a plot at the community garden, open to faculty and staff by lottery in spring, available by chance in fall.

Second-season gardening has its pleasures and sadness. The growing season is short and the light is waning. Then comes the frost.

Yet the season started with a pleasant surprise. As soon as the weed-whacker roared to life and cut one swath across a plot abandoned by the previous gardener, I spotted a plump bell pepper, then another and another. Soon Fern and I were clearing our plot by hand, and we found several tomato plants, a cucumber vine, carrots, broccoli, and, of course, peppers. The weeds were up to 24 inches at least, but in four hours of toiling in the sun, we had the garden cleared, the plants staked, and quite a bit of produce harvested. Then we set about planting seeds for lettuce and spinach under screened boxes to deter birds and rodents, setting out seedling collards and more lettuce for a fall harvest until frost comes.

As we took advantage of  our predecessor’s laxness, I wondered why would anyone walk away from a productive garden plot, especially one with compost, water, and mulch provided for free?

“Too busy….too much work,” I can almost hear the departed gardener saying. What nonsense. We all should have to work for at least some of our food. I suspect that in the not-distant future, we all will.

Not one hundred yards from the community garden, golfers spend hours wandering around after little white balls on a  landscape that requires thousands of gallons of water daily to keep green. In the early mornings, as I carefully water my new garden, organized to minimize run-off, I see firehose-sized sprayers at work until the excess water runs off and down the abandonned, overgrown road that runs past the garden gate.

Two worlds meet there, one sustainable and sane, the other doomed and excessive.

In a coming time of permanent simplicity, both of Peak Oil and clean water, I think I know what the future will bring. It won’t be more golfing.  But for now, I’ll just shrug, tend my plants, and pass on skills until the world renews itself again. Even as light wanes and the fall brings wrath from indifferent elements and an enraged electorate, that’s my seed-planting hope.

I’d rather live with hope than bitterness and rage, just as I’d rather work to grow my own food than to chase a little white ball around a chemically dose fairway.

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