things that make sense

It's difficult to describe just how satisfying it is eating something you have grown yourself. Probably because it is more of an adventure than a moment. The beginning is when you have lusted after a friend's veggie patch, quietly envied their seemingly genetic green thumb ('jerk') and wasted countless hours trawling homesteader blogs (it's garden porn and you know it). 

Then after a while, something or someone tells you that it's actually not rocket science to grow a lettuce; in fact it's pretty straightforward. So you spend a day turning a patch of lawn into a loose bed of soil. You get dirt under your fingernails and you feel new muscles aching at the end of the day. It feels good, it feels like action. Then comes that ultimate moment of faith – trickling out the tiniest seeds in an indentation you drew with a stick. And you think, really? This little dry bit of thing is going to transform into a big, showy lettuce with frilly edges? Juicy and lush? Sure. Whatever. But you persist. The wisdom of the countless growers before you becomes an encouraging hand on your shoulder and an encouraging word in your ear – yep, that's it. It is hard to believe, isn't it?

And this little patch of earth becomes a place that you want to return to. You come to water and stare hard at the ground hoping to spot the first speck of green that will signal success. But then you stay a while – because while your eye was down at soil level you notice a bug you have never met before. With a long nose like a snuffleupagus. It's incredible! You almost call your neighbours over to see but you restrain yourself. Besides, while you were watching this beetle a family of black ducks have been making their way down the rivulet and you don't want to move a muscle for fear of startling the ducklings. And all around you dew is caught in tiny and intricate spiderwebs joining blades of grass together. They look like silvery crocheted granny rugs. The earth is cool under your feet. The world is waking up and you realise you need to get to work so you leave your garden for now.

And weeks later, weeks made richer for your daily pilgrimages to your little patch, you behold the glory of the lettuce. It's so green it seems to emanate its own light. And while its hard to really fathom what's happened between the moment you pressed that seed into damp earth and this moment of cutting the lettuce head from its base, you accept it. In the way that you just-kind-of-have-to believe your parents when they show you a photo of a dimple-bummed baby and say – this is you. We are mere humans after all and sometimes things are just unfathomable.

You cut the lettuce and there is this embarrassingly heroic quality to the harvest. This beautiful thing you have grown. This food! And of course you were part of it, along with the seed, the soil, the compost, the worms, bacteria and fungi, the rain, the bees and the sun. You didn't just magic this lettuce from the ground, though it kind of feels like it. But you did get involved, in the most fundamental aspect of your existence. And I think it's ok to feel proud of that.

"Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible so we can be responsible for it...Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale & extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy".

-Matthew B Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

I have grown food in my various backyards for the past seven years or so. Even when I have the meagrest of yards with terrible growing prospects I still feel compelled to grow things. So I'll dig up some lawn or plant some herbs in pots or a succulent in a tin can. It's become a part of life that I find difficult to compromise. But it wasn't until I read Crawford's analysis of what it means to be frugal that I really grasped why. I wanted to understand something.

You see, I had spent five years at university studying anthropology and social work. This study opened up my mind. Concepts and assumptions were examined, illuminated, challenged and then torn apart. The pieces were spread far and wide with utter disregard, perhaps contempt, for the whole. By the end of my Arts degree I felt a little torn apart too. Sure, I was inspired and living inches in the air. Thinking about Everything yet also getting totally strung out with all this thinking and all this questioning. In the end, I was a little bit lost in a quagmire of unknowing. And wishing I had studied science. Where someone would just tell me: this here beetle is a Meriphus and it belongs to the Curculioninae sub-family and it consumes various floral parts, in particular, pollen, and in so doing aids cross-pollination of plant species. You know, facts.

I longed for facts. I could get a little paralysed in an endlessly self-reflexive analysis of, you know, the very idea of a beetle and the complex tensions implicit within the nature/human dichotomy and so on ad nauseam. In the end, I realised it wasn't just about facts. I craved a world that was intelligible. Or just a bit intelligible. And the garden, many gardens, became my consolation.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.
- Barbara Kingsolver

I've made gardening my job. I'm just starting out but this turns out to be the best job yet and feels more like a livelihood. It helps me to think not just about soil and seeds and the sun and the rain, but about economies, culture, work, ethics, philosophy - just about everything. It's a lens through which I start to understand, critique, re-imagine and create the kind of world I want to leave for future generations.  I read somewhere that while we can't change the type of ancestors we inherit we can affect the type of ancestor we will become. Now my ambitions are pretty mundane but I want my descendants to know and to be proud of where their food comes from.

So there is still a lot of thinking and questioning. But the scale can fit inside my head. The growth of a radish seed, a lady-bird hunting aphids, the taste of a tomato when it is so ripe it falls from the vine, heavy into my hand. The feeling of soil warmed from the day, the muscles in my arms and legs slowly strengthening to the tasks I demand of them. Things that make sense. 

Originally published in the Autumn 2013 edition of Betty Mag

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