To consume means to destroy. That’s why “consumption” was the name given
to tuberculosis.
– Vandana Shiva[i]
– Vandana Shiva[i]
Producing food. For
the most part, people alive today have lost touch with this most basic of human
activities. Instead, we have become
consumers. We acquire things. We accumulate things. We value ourselves and others based upon the
things we have accumulated. Quite a few
people are now trying to “green” their lives and plant gardens, but (as a
recent L.A. Times article
inadvertently demonstrated)
if they remain immersed in that acquisition mindset, their “greening” efforts
simply don’t pan out.
We have forgotten what it means to truly produce – to
produce the basic food necessary to sustain our bodies, to locate and capture
water, to make clothing and build basic shelter. Our food gardens are, for many of us, our
initial foray toward learning what it means to become a producer
again. And becoming a producer goes far,
far beyond “having” a vegetable garden, or anything we can go “buy” at a store.
Becoming a producer means leaving behind the acquisition
mindset. There is a reason we have the
phrase “working a garden” in our language.
It takes work: muscles, sweat, sometimes tears. Reacquiring the lost art of growing food
means learning new skills. It means
growing: growing plants and growing a
new sense of who you are. It means
stretching: both your physical body and
your psyche.
Even when you go out and buy a garden-ready 6‑pack of
vegetable seedlings, there will be no guarantees. If you plant them in searing sun, you may get
curly, withered little sprouts. If you
forget to water the plants, they will dry out and die. If slugs crawl over from the nearby overwatered
lawn, they’ll eat all the tender young shoots.
Or sprinkler overspray might cause mildew.
This is nature. This
is the wild world of your urban back yard, which comes complete with opossums,
hungry birds, and cabbage white butterflies.
You’ve emerged from the slick and shiny artificial world of
climate-controlled, chemical-cleaned, overprotected buildings into the
precarious real world, where the vagaries of sun and rain and wind and
grasshoppers rule. Humans are estranged
here. We don’t fully get it, and we
cannot control it.
For a very brief period of human history we have told teach
other a myth: that humans were above it all, that we could control life forces
with our intellect, with paper dollars, and with the harnessed power of fossil
fuels. Mother Nature let us think humans
were winning for a little while, but now the truth is dawning upon us: Humans
are part of a vast and myriad interconnected web of life.
The folly is over, and we are suddenly faced with an urgent
need to learn how to fit in. We need to
learn how to produce food without fossil fuels, how to capture water in areas
where this resource is precious, how to clothe and shelter ourselves with local
materials and far less impact on the planet.
We need to learn how to fit into the lifecycles of this small planet and
how to fit into the specifics of our local place upon this planet.
Gardening food is about feeding our families. It is about access to clean, organic,
health-building, truly-fresh food.
Growing food is about the most basic nourishment – of body, mind, and
spirit. As you read these pages and
venture deeper into the world of food growing, it will change you. It will touch you in ways you cannot even
imagine.
The word “touch” is key.
At the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, here in the Westchester area
of Los Angeles, we have noticed a few things:
Once people begin to get their fingers into the soil, the changes begin
to unfold. Perhaps you begin by buying a
plastic pot and some potting soil and a little 6-pack of chard to plant out on
your balcony. You find yourself drawn to
check on your little plants. Maybe you
amble outside clutching your morning cup of coffee, to see whether they’ve
grown overnight. You might notice that
the soil around your babies dried out; the weather was a little hotter
yesterday. If you were still inside a
climate-controlled office, you might not have noticed the weather, but now you
do.
The potting soil is pricey, but soon you learn that you can
make your own, so you begin to compost your kitchen scraps. One weekend perhaps you get impatient – one
pot of chard isn’t enough for a garden, you yearn to grow more. You find a spade and dig up a rectangle of
lawn. Your journey has deepened.
You notice that rainwater makes your plant babies grow
better, so perhaps you venture into capturing rainwater. You hear about an unusual Italian vegetable
and at a seed swap you discover seeds. Your
plant palette broadens a little, and with it your dietary choices. You learn the injustice of “food deserts,”
and yearn to help out. Suddenly you’re
volunteering to create new community gardens for others, even as you are
learning yourself.
We warn you: It won’t stop.
You thought you could go out and buy a few things to “get
started” in gardening. And in that you
were partially right: it was a
beginning. It was the beginning of
evolution into a whole new outlook – upon society, upon the world, upon life
itself.
Welcome to the journey.
You are beginning to grasp the clean, fresh feeling, the wholesome
pride, of what it means to become a producer again.
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The scale of how
much food it really takes to feed a family is astonishing –many bags of
vegetables per week. The prospect of
achieving a large part of this with locally grown food is absolutely
staggering.
The scale of how
much food comes out of a biointensively-planted urban space under
yield-conscious design is quite amazing!
Bins and bins, week after week, even on days when our garden team
had thought in overview that there would be “not much to harvest.”
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