Why garden?
Why I garden
The Hazelwood Urban Gardens and the Hazelwood Food Forest has had trouble getting resident member volunteers, so I'm writing this month about all the reasons I garden, in the hope that at least a few will read this and get turned on to what has become a lifelong passion for me.
I like to grow food. Everybody likes to eat, but the wiser and happier of us know how to get enjoyment out of feeding other people.
Everybody I know has to eat.
Food costs money, and, with all the environmental and economic changes going on at this moment in Earth's history, the price of food promises to go nowhere but up.
Good healthy fresh food is good for your health. And it tastes better. Your brain and other parts of your body work better when you eat well. Everything works better. You feel better. Your eyes work better, your ears, your sense of taste and smell. Think about it, all the millions of things your body does all depend on food.
I like getting out in nature. Some people were raised to be afraid of bugs and other living things. I was lucky enough to get a job as an adult doing farm work and so learned a way of living closer to the land. On this family farm in West Virginia we: made our own butter and buttermilk; grew and hunted meat; used good old fashioned manure for fertilizer; used water that came out of the hillsides for the livestock; picked apples and berries from farm and wild areas; grew grapes and other garden crops; canned tomatoes and fruit for the winter; cut, baled and carried hay; fed cows, sheep, and goats; helped the sheep give birth to their lambs; dug wells and ditches to channel water; drove tractor and pickup truck; cussed and shot at and every now and then ate groundhog (woodchuck); dug and sorted huge mounds of potatoes; put up potatoes and rutabagas and turnips in the root cellar; dug holes for posts and built fence; and did some of our own butchering. The miner/farmer I worked for (whose family I lived with) wasn't into making a lot of money; he wanted his kids to grow up the way he had - with forests and plenty to eat and neighbors helping each other when there was a problem.
I always did like living things, from flies and their maggots to leeches and slugs and deer and raccoons and... At our garden at the corner of Lytle and W. Elizabeth streets here in Hazelwood (which I call Everybody's Garden because people ask who's garden and I say "Everybody's") I found a little snake while digging the other day. A young boy I asked if he wanted to see a snake winced at first because he'd I guess been raised to be afraid of snakes. We have become so afraid of so many things we are blind to so much beauty everywhere.
A catch 22 we urban farming activists sometimes find ourselves caught in is that we offer free produce, gardening tips, and land for people to garden even if they don't own their own; but people tend to devalue anything that's free, thinking that it must not be worth much if it's free. This logic leads people to work hard at doing some job they don't really want to do or even believe in, so they can afford to buy food from stores which is not nearly the quality available free from the gardens. You do have to put some work in, starting with learning how to recognize the food that's right in front of you in the garden.
And you have to step back from assumptions you have been unconsciously making all your life about for instance what's edible. Farmers know that parts of the crops they grow are edible but not salable for no other reason than that the consumer is not used to it. An example is cabbage. Everybody knows cabbage comes in heads, but the farmer knows the outside leaves are also edible but are left in the field for the most part when the heads are harvested. There are many examples of this; I found out this past season parsley roots are if anything BETTER tasting than the leaves. There are many "edible weeds" - just another way of saying food crops most people don't know about - only a few of which I know about so far - lambs quarters, purslane, cleavers, sorrel, and others.
And then there are medicinal herbs. We have been brainwashed by advertising into assuming so many synthetic chemical medicines (prescription and over-the-counter both) are safe, while those same pharmaceutical manufacturers have become corporate fear-mongers when it comes to making us overly cautious about natural medicines. It says somewhere in the Bible "Let food be for your medicine." We have got to stop killing ourselves with all kinds of diseases caused by not eating of the banquet table Nature put before us.
Saving money - by growing your own cooking herbs, for instance - somehow doesn't seem as substantial as first making money and then spending that money buying those culinary herbs. But the oregano, rosemary, thyme, chives, mint, dill, and other herbs you buy at the store are going to be less fresh, less nutritious and so less tasty than those you can grow in your back (or front) yard.
The Hazelwood Food Forest has Sunday work/share knowledge days from 5:30 till sunset, and the Hazelwood Urban Garden has every Saturday (hopefully, if more people start coming) morning get together at Everybody's Garden from dawn to whenever where we can enjoy networking, complain about the weeds getting ahead of us, or talk strategies for keeping the wild plants and critters in their places, and, for those rare moments when we actually feel like working, there's plenty of work to do (You decide what YOU want to do at any of the gardens.) We have a garden on Ladora Way which has plenty of space for private beds (I wonder if we started charging for garden plots as other neighborhoods do that might actually attract takers). We have a garden on Flowers Ave. The Tenant Council has a garden on Johnston Ave which has so far garlic and will have radish and maybe turnips, rutabagas, potatoes, and other root crops. The Hazelwood YMCA garden and greenhouse area includes a see-saw play pump to get rainwater from the roof's rain barrels up to the garden, and we have flats of plant starts in the greenhouse there getting ready to plant out and distribute.
All life is miraculous. We are at the height of an advanced civilization producing technological miracles every day. If we don't achieve warlessness by using our knowledge to usher in a harmonious new age, our fear-caused inability to work together will soon completely collapse the ecosystem we depend on. We need prayer AND action. Heaven and Hell are right here waiting for each of us to decide. We have to almost completely eliminate combustion processes - stop burning anything - and move toward decentralized power and food production. As impossibly idealistic as it seems to think that humanity could make such historically drastic changes (such as moving away from the flush toilet to the composting toilet), to be for anything less than the total transformation of our culture and industry would be too little too late. Environmental feedback effects are already taking the planet past critical tipping points, so that the only thing we can be sure of is that drastic change is in our near future. And we can be sure that the extent we ignore fear and enjoy love of all life will be the extent that future will be good.
The Hazelwood Urban Gardens and the Hazelwood Food Forest has had trouble getting resident member volunteers, so I'm writing this month about all the reasons I garden, in the hope that at least a few will read this and get turned on to what has become a lifelong passion for me.
I like to grow food. Everybody likes to eat, but the wiser and happier of us know how to get enjoyment out of feeding other people.
Everybody I know has to eat.
Food costs money, and, with all the environmental and economic changes going on at this moment in Earth's history, the price of food promises to go nowhere but up.
Good healthy fresh food is good for your health. And it tastes better. Your brain and other parts of your body work better when you eat well. Everything works better. You feel better. Your eyes work better, your ears, your sense of taste and smell. Think about it, all the millions of things your body does all depend on food.
I like getting out in nature. Some people were raised to be afraid of bugs and other living things. I was lucky enough to get a job as an adult doing farm work and so learned a way of living closer to the land. On this family farm in West Virginia we: made our own butter and buttermilk; grew and hunted meat; used good old fashioned manure for fertilizer; used water that came out of the hillsides for the livestock; picked apples and berries from farm and wild areas; grew grapes and other garden crops; canned tomatoes and fruit for the winter; cut, baled and carried hay; fed cows, sheep, and goats; helped the sheep give birth to their lambs; dug wells and ditches to channel water; drove tractor and pickup truck; cussed and shot at and every now and then ate groundhog (woodchuck); dug and sorted huge mounds of potatoes; put up potatoes and rutabagas and turnips in the root cellar; dug holes for posts and built fence; and did some of our own butchering. The miner/farmer I worked for (whose family I lived with) wasn't into making a lot of money; he wanted his kids to grow up the way he had - with forests and plenty to eat and neighbors helping each other when there was a problem.
I always did like living things, from flies and their maggots to leeches and slugs and deer and raccoons and... At our garden at the corner of Lytle and W. Elizabeth streets here in Hazelwood (which I call Everybody's Garden because people ask who's garden and I say "Everybody's") I found a little snake while digging the other day. A young boy I asked if he wanted to see a snake winced at first because he'd I guess been raised to be afraid of snakes. We have become so afraid of so many things we are blind to so much beauty everywhere.
A catch 22 we urban farming activists sometimes find ourselves caught in is that we offer free produce, gardening tips, and land for people to garden even if they don't own their own; but people tend to devalue anything that's free, thinking that it must not be worth much if it's free. This logic leads people to work hard at doing some job they don't really want to do or even believe in, so they can afford to buy food from stores which is not nearly the quality available free from the gardens. You do have to put some work in, starting with learning how to recognize the food that's right in front of you in the garden.
And you have to step back from assumptions you have been unconsciously making all your life about for instance what's edible. Farmers know that parts of the crops they grow are edible but not salable for no other reason than that the consumer is not used to it. An example is cabbage. Everybody knows cabbage comes in heads, but the farmer knows the outside leaves are also edible but are left in the field for the most part when the heads are harvested. There are many examples of this; I found out this past season parsley roots are if anything BETTER tasting than the leaves. There are many "edible weeds" - just another way of saying food crops most people don't know about - only a few of which I know about so far - lambs quarters, purslane, cleavers, sorrel, and others.
And then there are medicinal herbs. We have been brainwashed by advertising into assuming so many synthetic chemical medicines (prescription and over-the-counter both) are safe, while those same pharmaceutical manufacturers have become corporate fear-mongers when it comes to making us overly cautious about natural medicines. It says somewhere in the Bible "Let food be for your medicine." We have got to stop killing ourselves with all kinds of diseases caused by not eating of the banquet table Nature put before us.
Saving money - by growing your own cooking herbs, for instance - somehow doesn't seem as substantial as first making money and then spending that money buying those culinary herbs. But the oregano, rosemary, thyme, chives, mint, dill, and other herbs you buy at the store are going to be less fresh, less nutritious and so less tasty than those you can grow in your back (or front) yard.
The Hazelwood Food Forest has Sunday work/share knowledge days from 5:30 till sunset, and the Hazelwood Urban Garden has every Saturday (hopefully, if more people start coming) morning get together at Everybody's Garden from dawn to whenever where we can enjoy networking, complain about the weeds getting ahead of us, or talk strategies for keeping the wild plants and critters in their places, and, for those rare moments when we actually feel like working, there's plenty of work to do (You decide what YOU want to do at any of the gardens.) We have a garden on Ladora Way which has plenty of space for private beds (I wonder if we started charging for garden plots as other neighborhoods do that might actually attract takers). We have a garden on Flowers Ave. The Tenant Council has a garden on Johnston Ave which has so far garlic and will have radish and maybe turnips, rutabagas, potatoes, and other root crops. The Hazelwood YMCA garden and greenhouse area includes a see-saw play pump to get rainwater from the roof's rain barrels up to the garden, and we have flats of plant starts in the greenhouse there getting ready to plant out and distribute.
All life is miraculous. We are at the height of an advanced civilization producing technological miracles every day. If we don't achieve warlessness by using our knowledge to usher in a harmonious new age, our fear-caused inability to work together will soon completely collapse the ecosystem we depend on. We need prayer AND action. Heaven and Hell are right here waiting for each of us to decide. We have to almost completely eliminate combustion processes - stop burning anything - and move toward decentralized power and food production. As impossibly idealistic as it seems to think that humanity could make such historically drastic changes (such as moving away from the flush toilet to the composting toilet), to be for anything less than the total transformation of our culture and industry would be too little too late. Environmental feedback effects are already taking the planet past critical tipping points, so that the only thing we can be sure of is that drastic change is in our near future. And we can be sure that the extent we ignore fear and enjoy love of all life will be the extent that future will be good.
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 8:16 AM
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