Food is the love language of the Earth to our bodies. Learning to read it is the first step, which is simply finding out what’s already growing. Speaking this love language comes when you cook, share, and eat food. And writing in this language is where gardening comes in. It’s seed starting and saving, planting, harvesting, pruning, weeding, and watering.
I remember the summer when plants went from inanimate objects to sentient beings, each with their own behavior, and their own relationships with each other.
It wasn’t my first year gardening. It wasn’t my second.
I wasn’t even in the garden when it happened. I was riding my bike to work when my jaw dropped. I had been reading WILD EDIBLE PLANTS by John Kallas. I recognized plants from the book that the day before, were just a blur. It was chicory in full bloom. After that, every stand of green I saw transformed into individual species, one by one. I couldn’t unsee each plant as individuals, each with their own arsenal of secret properties. Some were edible, some medicinal, some both and some poisonous.
Before, I was doing what most of us whose inheritance of plant knowledge was lost long before I was born. I was playing in a sandbox of dirt, spending plenty, harvesting little. It was an amusing hobby that I wanted to grow into, an aesthetic I wanted to incorporate. I learned a little here and there, and as with all things we eventually figure out, we have to start somewhere.
A little part of my heart curls up and dies every time I hear someone say “I tried, I just have a black thumb.” No, darling, you don’t. It’s just that if you want to grow plants, you’ll have to fail your way to success. It’s like writing 150,000 words just to get to the 80,000 that will stay. It’s the scraps on the cutting room floor. Only better, because dead plants don’t stay dead. They return to the nutrient cycle, the compost pile, and become food for microbes, fungi, and other things.
My theory is that it’s not the dead plants that scare people off from gardening. It’s the relationship with death itself. Follow through with it, through the ick and mess, and you’ll see that all death begets life in a very literal sense. It’s soil fertility, which makes biodiversity possible. It’s not fun when something dies before you intended, but it becomes less painful, less personal then.
Lest we veer too off course, please remember that gardening itself is not a protest. In and of itself, it’s not revolutionary. It deserves a place within a revolutionary framework, but you still have to plug into your community and show up when it counts. On its own, gardening will not spare you from a zombie apocalypse. Sorry to the ‘preppers’ and those who remember the Walking Dead episodes where they made a farm happen out of thin air and convenient plot devices.
Real food sovereignty is possible. It’s how we evolved to be a social species. No matter where you trace your ancestral roots from, you can find a history full of traditional foods and culture that came to being because they helped achieve food sovereignty.
I’m not here to unpack that right now, though. The urgency of impending spring is upon us. What I want to do is help those who feel called to grow plants, whether for food, medicine, or wild habitat, to cross over that line between plants as objects and plants as beings. There’s no course, no mentor, no book, no matter how helpful, that can do that for you. That’s between you and the plants. But I can share the tools that have helped me:
Learn to identify wild plants. My first abundant harvest was lamb’s quarters, or wild spinach. Wild plants, whether growing as weeds in your garden or foraged from along a bike path, are the blueprint. All domesticated vegetables and herbs are descended from wild plants, and their botanical families are often well represented in natural areas.
Explore the difference between form and function. When you understand how you want your growing space to function, you can explore multiple options to achieve that to find the best way to implement it. Going form-first, you may think “I really want a greenhouse.” But is your functional intent to propagate lots of baby plants that demand lots of daily care? How many baby plants do you really have room for? Maybe you’d rather have a picnic table in that space to host garden parties instead.
Don’t leave yourself out of the equation. What do you like to eat? How much time do you plan to spend in your garden? What about beautification? Your enjoyment is always a high-priority crop. If the garden demands more care than you have to give, it can become a sore spot. It’s not a failure. As nice as it would be, you can’t quit your job to accommodate your garden. You just need to plan and design the garden to work with what you have, and want, to give it.
Set yourself up for success by sourcing or making compost ahead of time. Please, don’t buy the topsoil in plastic bags at the last second at the grocery store. It’s cut off from oxygen, which promotes anerobic bacteria. It’s also an extremely unregulated industry. Ideally, you will establish a composting system a year before you even start, but that’s not usually how it goes. I get it. The sooner, the better, though. Because you will have plant debris that need to go somewhere. Reach out to me if you like in the Milwaukee area and you want my recommendations for sourcing compost!
Another aspect of setting yourself up for success comes when choosing varieties. Understand which climate zone you’re in (for us in SE WI, it’s 5b). Pick varieties that are adapted to the climate you’re growing in. Unfortunately, most transplants offered at big box stores are the same ones grown in California, where the majority of vegetables are grown in the US. We aren’t California! We have a shorter growing season, higher humidity, and with that comes fungal disease. The same goes for plants selected for performance in an organic system vs. conventional. You want the ones with natural resilience if you don’t plan on spraying pesticides and herbicides.
Stay tuned for announcements on an upcoming workshop I’m excited to offer: Garden Design to Blow Your Mind! It will come with worksheets you can fill out that will help you collect information and make decisions that will have resounding benefits all season long.
Come May, our farm will also be offering our certified organic annual seedling sale. All varieties are free of neonicotinoids, which are systemic pesticides applied to non-organic seed that has averse affects on pollinators. Because it’s systemic, the chemical is transferred to every cell of the plant for the duration of its life, even if you never apply anything to it. I am a big fan of planting forage for bees and butterflies, but if that’s your jam, make sure they aren’t laced with those pesticides!
I want to hear your garden stories. Feel free to share in the comments! Perennial gardens, canning gardens, herb gardens, flower gardens, sensory gardens, all of it. Thanks for reading and happy garden planning!
Resources:
FOOD NOT LAWNS by H. C. Flores
can’t wait for your class. 🌱 I owe reparations to the monarchs this year so I’ll be planting milkweed where I had zinnias last year. our community garden had a mantis infestation and the zinnias became their hunting grounds. I’ve never seen so many dead butterflies.