Sowing Seeds

Last weekend my men got the tanks in for our latest experiment in urban gardening - our stock tank garden (we couldn't resist the photo op before we filled them with dirt). It reminded me of this essay I wrote a few years back. The boys are older now - a huge help in the garden - and will be doing more manly things this summer than I mention here. But mostly, this essay still resonates. So, back by popular demand (mine!) and "updated for today's English" it's...the spring garden post.

The latest is something called Urban Farming. When we heard that phrase the other night, Sean started to snicker and said, “Grandma Vivian’s plot of land on the farm in Kansas was over an acre, planted to the gills, and she called it ‘a garden’.”

I suppose it’s easier to see the difference between a farm and a garden when you have a real working farm around you as far as the eye can see. Someone once said, “Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.”[i] So I can see, considering the soaring rate of unemployment in our cities, why folks might turn to their shovels. Taking time away from the madding crowd, digging one’s hands into the dirt, using muscles you haven’t used before, I can tell you from experience, this is very therapeutic.

I guess the idea of a garden was just too tame for some goal oriented go-getters. No simple “plot of ground where plants are cultivated” would do. No, they would turn their city bound pieces of land into Farms. A “tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production” sounds so much more professional, ultra-productive–it’s something you could put on a resume!

But wait, there’s more. It’s not just a farm–it’s the Urban Farming Movement. Urban Farming is “the practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in, or around (peri-urban), a village, town or city.” That’s management level stuff, complete with jargon and everything.

So now Aunt Phyllis will be happy to learn that when she drops off that box of zucchini and tomatoes in the church kitchen next fall, she’s not just demonstrating God’s beneficence through a sweet act of kindness. No, she is an URBAN AGRICULTURALIST!! (Can Urban Home Farming federal subsidies be far behind?)

You will be glad to know there is a web-site where you can sign up to join their movement. You can friend them on Facebook, and sign up for their Twitter feed. One wonders when we will have time to water and weed.

How about this? How about just digging up a little patch of lawn in your yard, or filling up a container, and calling your children to come see—not to weed, but to plant. Because, as someone else once said, “Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden.”[ii] Then, send them off to play, or to read, or to swim, or to ride their bikes this summer, and sit for a while. Think about how, in the cool and quiet of evening when the last rays of sun slide behind western hills, you will weed, water, and nurture those little shoots when they appear. No maximizing production. No distribution mechanisms.

In my garden this summer, I will “visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.”[iii] When the first shoots push out of the ground, I will call the children to smile and exult in great expectation and hope for a bountiful harvest. Because it is “one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.”[iv]

Over the years, I've spent a lot of time in “urban environments,” and I understand the desire to turn a vacant, garbage-strewn lot into a paradise. But why isn’t that enough for us? Watching the way beauty and life can spring from ugliness and death on this planet should leave us awe-struck and speechless. I admire anything that gives children in the inner-city something hopeful and happy to do in between dodging bullets and turning down illegal drugs on their way home from school. To have healthy, well-fed children is a good goal. 

But I’m puzzled by our grinding ambition to make ourselves seem more important to the process than we actually are.

Despite what I do in my garden, some things will flourish, some things will die, and there will be many surprises–both the disappointing and the joyful–along the way. Because “there is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class…”[v]

You see, it isn’t about Production and Distribution. It’s about miracles, and perseverance, character, hope, and joy. In the end, yes, there will be food to share. In the end, we will have more than any of us can eat. Not because we toiled and labored and incited movement.

But simply because The Creator is really good at what He does. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;/ And though the last lights off the black West went/ Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—/ Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”[vi]

Happy spring and happy gardening!

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[i] Orson Scott Card

[ii] Robert Brault

[iii] Nathaniel Hawthorne

[iv] Nathaniel Hawthorne

[v] Alfred Austin

[vi] Gerard Manley Hopkins