Gardening

So, the new 4'x12'1' raised bed is now in place, and I've tilled the bejeebus out of the inside portion, pulling up innumerable rocks and even one giant tree root.  The clover that formerly covered the base of the bed area is now chopped into a bazillion tiny fine particles, which has turned the clay soil from "sterile gray" to "loamy black," almost by magic.  As I stood back after my exertions, happy and sweaty, I suddenly realized.... that the bed was a foot too close to the patio, and somehow skewed at a funny angle.  D'OH!  Oh well, I'll right those wrongs on saturday, after the snowstorm blows through here tomorrow.  The next step is to pound in some rebar and build a hoop house over the bed, so that the tomatoes and basil that I'm going to plant in there next spring actually have a chance to grow and ripen through the (relatively) short hot-growth season here amid all the hungry deer that skulk into my yard in the mornings intent on turning my herbs and vegetables into piles of deer poop.  The final step will come in the spring, when I order a truckload of compost to fill the bed.

I've definitely turned into a gardening maniac.  Part of it has to do with a distaste for buying produce that has been shipped from Peru (seriously.  Avocados from Peru) or even just as close as California -- if I can organically grow cucumbers and horseradish in my back yard, why should I be supporting an industry that ships the same food thousands of miles?  And why am I eating oranges in december -- just because I can?  They're out of season here.  It's a waste.  I view manicured lawns as a kind of shame now: where there could be a row of dill and calendula, why place a lawn?  Each summer weekend, my neighbors fire up their two-stroke gasoline mowers to perform the chore of trimming, blowing fumes into the air, while I weed my garden beds; they return inside either none the happier or perhaps even frustrated at another hour of another day lost to appearances, while I come inside feeling at peace from the meditation of the connection to earth and soil.

That's the crux, really: it has simply to do with reconnecting with the earth: getting dirt under my fingernails, improving the land, building and creating something living and vital where before there was nothing.  We often hear how modern life is too fast, too hectic -- "life out of balance," as the tagline for the movie Koyaanisqatsi so convincingly portrayed it, way back in 1983.  There are certain unavoidable facts about being human, and one of them is that we cannot live  in isolation from the world, no matter how much we might think we want to do so.

Perhaps this philosophical meandering is stupid.  I wouldn't disagree, were someone to think so.  But I do know that come autumn, my neighbors have bags of lawn trimmings as their crops, while I have horseradish, dill, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, mint, corn, squash, basil, calendula, rhubarb, blueberries, raspberries, lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, peppers, dandelions, carrots, peas, onions, chives, rosemary.  And we spend the same amount of time out there.

So I till, and plan; I start seedlings and put the autumn bulbs in the ground; I welcome the shorter days as harbingers of a new spring to come, and I'm glad to be covered in mud.