Five essentials for gardeners
A garden is an opportunity for art projects, scientific experiments, meditation, useful yoga posturing and engineering challenges. A gardener chooses to garden because there is food to be grown, and the experience can be a mindful escape if you let it, cabbage loopers notwithstanding.
Gardens differ depending on who is gardening and where the garden plot is. Some folks have only a few pots on a sunny deck but still grow peppers and herbs. These gardeners might be just as vigilant and dedicated as the gardener who dug up the backyard.
Some backyard gardeners create perfectly straight rows exactly two feet apart sprayed regularly with weed-killer products to reduce labor because time is of the essence. Other gardeners have dirty jeans because they crawl and crouch around odd-shaped beds to pull weeds, remove rocks and clear their heads of the daily news. They sometimes smell like horse manure.
There are many food products grown on plots of land hundreds of acres in size patrolled by large machines and irrigated by elaborate infrastructure, but these are factories, not gardens. Because of these factories we get bread, soy products, corn (later frozen and packaged in plastic bags) and other daily essentials. Backyard gardens usually are not big enough to grow much wheat just like most of us don’t have cows at home, so our communities figure out ways to supply what we do not grow locally. Bananas, for example.
So, in spite of our different gardening strategies and preferences, there are five essentials for every gardener.
- Water
You can garden without dirt. Hydroponic gardens grow an impressive list of plants, almost all of them legal. Typical salad and leafy plants plus tomatoes and peppers will grow in a hydroponic system. The catch is you will need elaborate infrastructure unless you are doing this in a quiet mountain stream. The plants survive on what’s in the water. The typical deck or backyard garden, however, grows in healthy, handsome dirt enriched over the years with compost, leaf mulch and horse or cow poo. Rabbit poo is good, too. But as soon as seeds or transplants go in, you need water.
I knew a family that filled buckets of water in a stream and carried the buckets uphill to their garden. Some folks collect rainwater in barrels. My garden gate is 41 steps from the water source and it is takes another 13 steps to reach the middle of the garden, so in lieu of digging a long trench and laying pipe, I string a couple hoses together and make the brisk walk back and forth from the faucet to the garden.
Some gardeners install drip systems which deliver water exactly where it needs to go thereby saving water and hand-watering time but obligating the gardener to occasionally unclog the drip lines. Other gardeners hook up mighty sprinklers which throw water toward the plants, pathways, fences, and, depending on the wind, nearby trees and neighbors. There are many strategies for watering, but unless it is a garden of drought-tolerant plants you are tending, you will need to remember to water.
- Wisdom of the ages
We are not the first ones to garden, so the wisdom from all the past gardens is easily available to those who allow the ever-curious child inside to listen to what the dirt, sun, wind and plants tell us. And if you go to the garden at night, you can listen to the moon and stars. There will be the daily clattering inside your head at first, but that noise will settle as your pants get dirtier and the pile of pulled weeds grows, and your attention to what plants need from you gets clearer.
“Thanks for the weeding and cultivating and all that” said the wax bean plants, “but a quick dose of horsey would sure spice up the neighborhood… and how about a drink to tide us ove?” And they say this by the color of their leaves or their posture. Soil announces it is time to cultivate by holding water on top instead of absorbing it. So pay attention.
Because gardening is a personal journey, different gardeners listen to the beats of different drummers. Seems to me, however, the wisdom available to all who listen is essentially the same thing as all gardeners being in the same drum circle.
- A place to sit
I find it difficult to go to the garden and do just the one thing I went there for, so after propping up the garden gate, weeding around the blueberries, hauling the debris to the brush pile which involves raking up around the pile, mulching the garlic, I finally get around to harvesting garlic chives for my soup. Good thing there’s a bench to rest on in the afternoon sun or early morning or a moonlit evening because there is plenty to listen to.
- Fun
Gardening is art, science, engineering and history. In my first garden, I instinctively dug curvy irrigation canals down the middle of the beds and planted around them. Seemed like a good idea. I was not the first to irrigate with canals, but it was artistic and a success. Speaking of engineering and art, trellises can be fashioned with bamboo canes as verticals and garden twine woven between as the horizontals in any old design a gardener can imagine. Snow peas and cucumbers welcome all designs as long as they get to climb.
When constructing a trellis, I think of how many people in the world are doing exactly the same garden task but with different materials in different weather and with different clattering in their heads, yet we are doing the same thing because we want to and we have access to the same shared wisdom of the ages.
- Everything else
Gardeners understand the quiet excitement of perusing seed catalogs, the value of making tools last forever, wearing out last year’s gloves and getting down to task with a brand new pair, and the eternal, chemical mystery of compost. And all gardeners understand the need for a steady source of manure and someone to give the extra tomato plants to. We’re a community. Gardeners share stories and trade advice just like church ladies swap recipes because we have tapped into the shared experience that runs through all our histories, and that is what we hear sitting on that bench.
So, in the end, gardening is not just harvesting radishes and ‘maters but it’s an archetypal connection – what we hear and feel and how dirty we get.