It's all about the garden

The collapse is underway, and there has been little more to add about that. Fuel prices reflecting export land model (ELM) has the rear of the bell curve collapsing faster than Hubbert could ever have expected. It's good to be aware of global warming but perhaps we would all be better served by trying to figure out a way to do without fuel, oil and cars at all. If we could do that, we would have some insulation, personally, from the complete transportation collapse that is on our door step.

I have been busy pursuing all those processes that might give me maximum flexibility in the uncertain, but certainly lesser energy future. A big part of that is providing that which will be not provided in our future - food and energy. So spring for me has been spent converting a field and old garden space into food production. My hope is to be able to feed the vegetable/starches part of the diet for two humans at least, working up to 8 humans eventually on 1/2 acre of land. I can see that 4000 sq ft may be a reasonable garden for feeding 4 people in Oregon's wet and then dry climate, but personally the doing of it is very labor intensive, time intensive and just plain wears me out.

The earth is a she. Why do I think that? Because I feel her when I till and plant and encourage the baby plants. I feel her like you feel a lover, like you feel your mother but never know it until she dies, and then only by her absence. I miss my mother. I miss that embracing acceptance, the durable love. Oddly I feel an attachment to the dirt I work and to the plants she gives me.

Gardening is too soft word for the process of raising food to eat to live. Gardening is Mr. Rogers in a tweed sweater encouraging a young cabbage to grow through kind words. Gardening is for modern man or woman. Gardening is about one tomato a year, a sprig of parsley. That was gardening before. It is not the food production of now and of the future. Gardening was about accent, now it is about substance. It was optional, now becoming mandatory.

That was my mindset anyway when I covered a thirty foot by forty foot area of semi abandoned but somewhat mowed flat soil and clay with cardboard and plastic last year. I could see future food feeding me and seven others. It was all math and size and production and a long to do list leading up to it. As most of you know, I came back early to Oregon this year to get into "production.

I felt a cold resistance to removing the card board and plastic. There are two garden plots and one area of fruit trees. I dug in the new trees, the soil was wet and heavy, the water table high, everything asleep, almost dead in heavy clay. I felt nothing but alone and wet and cold. I had to hand spade the small garden, and my back was so sore every day as I dug and hoed, slamming the hoe down into the unyeilding black wet muck. I planted onion bulbs, and soon peas and beets there. My back was sore every day.

The last month and one half has been a maelstrom of fence building, making a green house out of casa blanca, planting apple trees, blueberries, building new compost piles, tilling, digging, hoeing, planting. Recently I have been surprised to find that I seem to have entered into a contract. I planted she reluctantly gives me her babies, she yeilds. I understand that, the reluctance to bring forth, the offering of baby plants, waiting to see if I will water, weed and care for them. She questions my durability, my commitment to take and use the bounty that she provides. It is one thing to plant, another to reap.

Like most people, my life is buying food, or fast food and that's it. Now as the garden rows are visible and promising, I think of the ways in which I can meld that productive plenty to a lifestyle that is 8 feet wide and 22 feet long. But that is the nature of all enterprises. The contract is always drawn between parties that have yet to yeild, yet to perform and each must then rise.

The earth is rising, shit, burgening actually, and my new contract is to use that, to use the food, and to increase the fertility, to make the food that best that it can be to eat (the right nutrients and trace minerals), and most of all, to complete the many cycles of growth and decay. To do that I must constantly set aside what is easiest and work on that which is present in front of me.
For her part, the earth soothes my mind as I hoe, and bubbles delight up through me when I find new plants pushing up. Potatoes tight grimaced an a darker green than possible to the frightening visage of slasher movie zucchini come to pillage. Carrots are diffident in their small barely commited feather wisp, next to beans who are the only ones who can talk to the zucchini at all.
The corn masquerades as grass, nothing special it says to surrounding weeds, but holding coiled inside the code to tower over them all, and shade them to death. Only the beans and the zucchini are unimpressed. Floppy topped onions all hilled up, droopy leaved beets craving viagra, and radishes, already entering their final days, tall and proud and providing.
These all are the world under her control and my performance, sore back or not. The fecund earth is the real thing, our jobs and twitches and automatic responses, cream, no sugar, no jacket, no straw, these are the meaningless noise of "civilization."
I say all this to let you know that when your desparately trying to grow food there are rewards that might be unexpected, and connection that while unexpected is deep and good in unexpected ways.



It was the contract that has been drawn, an agreement that has grown up. Like an ugly dog who persists, I have been let in again, and now she has expectations of me. Who? The she that I have woken.