Growing Beyond The Euclidean World; or, In Defense of the Unruly Garden

I have a planter in my kitchen with a sad Colocasia that goes through periods of voluptuous growth and pitiful bare survival. Mostly I must admit that this is because of my neglect. And this I suspect has something to do with the fact that it lives in what is supposed to be a sleek, immaculate white glazed ceramic pot. Without being too dramatic, this pot has come to seem to me the epitome of modernism, a reaching for and confidence in a pure and totalizing universe of fundamental principles. It is the obverse of Malevich's Suprematist Black Square.

There is a violence in its demand for perfection (not surprisingly it came from Walmart), even as it makes room for the plant in its center. Like LeCorbusier's Esprit Nouveau pavilion with that tree growing through it, it is stunning visually but completely in denial about the nature of nature, acting more like a cage than a residence. Do the falling leaves stain the pure white of the structure? Do the roots buckle the foundation? What happens when a storm brings a limb or the whole tree down on the building? I imagine that when decisions have to be made, it is the building and not the tree (which was there first) that come first.

It is also a failure, and why I think I have subconsciously given the living being that resides in it short shrift. Every time I water the plant soil splashes up along the interior edges and cakes on in clumps when it dries. Dust and soil inevitably dull the pure shine of its white exterior. What is supposed to gleam with a "clean" look only appears dirty , dingy, and diminished, and this simply because of the forces at work around the living being inside it that the planter purportedly exists in service of.

And so, I find that I conveniently forget to water the plant. It's like I've developed a blind spot for it. I've come to hate the planter, but really I wonder if the planter, its denial of the messiness of life, and the resulting dinginess of it have somehow caused me to hate the plant instead. In any case the poor colocasia is stumbling along. (How much of this applies to people and architecture too I wonder?) The only hope will be if I move that plant to a new pot and/or radically rethink how forms interconnect with each other. (Again, what about people?)

In a sense what it lacks is what my terracotta pots have: porosity. Salts from the water I pour into them crust on the lip of the pots. Blooms of white and sometimes a little green algae cover their sides. pots chip and texture forms at the breaks. Pots crack but still hold together. The "cooked earth" of the clay pot is not alien to but close cousin to the "raw earth" inside it. Water and air flow up, down, and through the pot as well as the earth as well as the plant. Here is one system, flowing with life. Here is a wabi-sabi admittal of change and impermanence. Here is time.

All of this is really just preamble and window into my increasing conviction that gardening is most fully accomplished when done without edges. Or, put another way, I think I am done with raised beds built in neat rectangles with wood planks.

Particularly in permaculture design, there is often an emphasis on the virtue of edges, but these are not the edges I'm speaking of. Those edges are perhaps better called margins and they are really anti-edges. They are the indeterminate spaces where different regions with different functions meet and merge. In fact it is the inability to delineate a clear "edge" in these margins that makes them so fruitful and profitable. The edge I mean is the edge of the straightedge, the line, the fence, the definition, the name, the "thing," ultimately the "I."

In the greenhouses at the George Jones Farm where I work we have a series of constructed beds, made mostly from slabwood, designed in a series of rectangles. They are great, but they are also the bane of my life. The wood holds the soil in place but it also catches my feet as I try to crouch. The wood creates order, but it also makes the edge of soil that it holds unusable as a growing space. Instead of a rectangle of verticle right angles, imagine a wall-less trapezoid whose sloping edges are another surface for planting on. The wood tells me this is a planting space and this is a path for walking on. Curious how weeds haven't heard this. The seam between path and wood is where every undesirable plant finds a home, particularly the thistle covered in spines whose only weakness is a lack of spines right at its base, which in the world of raised beds is (in)conveniently right where my trowel or hands can't reach.

Ultmately what the the tidy world of the rectangular raised bed and the gleaming glazed white pot have in common is a denial of reality and the omnipresence of life. Here is the bed of lettuce, there is the path for walking. Here inside is the soil and there outside is the gleaming surface of the planter. Here is value, there is emptiness. Here is life, there is not. Is the world of form whose fruit is Malevich and Le Corbusier and my Walmart planter ultimately predicated on: here is chaos, there is order, and form is the wall between?

But there are the thistles bursting from the edges, refusing to abide by these conjurations of lines and forms. And so in a world of borders (whether flower borders or national borders), what can any transgressor be but illegal, worthy of extermination? This is the logic created by a worldview of rectangles and circles, of lines and linear time.

What is lost is the radical notion that life inhabits every space according to causes and conditions and that in each instance there is (for lack of a better word) a "purpose" for what exists. In other words, I would argue that the problem lies in privileging space over function.

Why do thistles emerge precisely where my trowel cannot reach? They thrive in poor soils and the compacted pathway is a perfect place for them. Rather than curse them for being somewhere I don't want to be, I should be asking, "What are you doing there?" Really, "what" are you doing?

A central tenet of permaculture thinking is that "the problem is the solution." From a spatial persepctive, why are thistles the bane of my weed-pulling life? They have brittle taproots that reach deep into the soil and are impossible to completely remove, leaving behind pieces that will inevitable resprout. But from a functional perspective, what thistles accomplish is the release of deeply buried micro-nutrients to the surface where other plants can use them. Their deep roots also help to aerate the soil, making it easier for other plants to grow in their wake.

Throw some cardboard over those thistles to smother them. All those nutrients will be released just below the surface and as the thistle roots rot, other plants' roots can move in. A few slits in the cardboard and I can plant tomatoes, basil, pretty much anything in there. If I can respect the function of life that arises and work with it, possibilities arise endlessly.

For me this approach has been a revelation, evaporating all those rectangles and lines and borders, not only spatially, but conceptually and temporally too. When there is a line, there is a bed and a path. When there is a definition, there is a crop and a weed. When there is a season, a garden bed holds first one crop, then another.

In all three cases I have found myself freed from unnecessary restrictions in this past year of farming:

Space:

In the farm's Learning Garden, weeds have been a horrible problem in the stone-dust paths. However, chamomile seeds from plants in the beds in 2009 sprouted everywhere in the paths this year. The same has been happening this fall, with errant arugula seeds sprouting into gorgeous plants in the paths. Next year, I hope to plant lots and lots of thyme cuttings throughout the paths. Why should the "path" be a dead zone? It never can be, so why not see it as a specialized growing space with great drainage and lots of heat?

Concept:

I've written a lot already on this blog about re-thinking what exactly is food and widening the scope of our culinary repertoire. Chickweed, amaranth, lamb's quarters, purslane, and cattails have figured prominently this year at the farm as examples of this idea. In another vein, we have a part of our field that is overrun with Artemisia vulgaris, mugwort, and we had artichokes which produced only foliage and no flowers (and hence "artichokes") this year. By freeing them from the labels "weed" and "crop," I was able to convert both into holiday wreaths (check out my last post, "Farm Art" for pictures).

Time:

For me this has been the most interesting experiment in shifting paradigms. Early in the spring, a row of last year's kale plants stood like ghostly sticks poking out of the ground right where I planned on sowing peas. Rather than remove them I left them as preliminary in-ground staking for the peas. To my surprise, mst of the kale began to sprout from the base, having survived the winter. So, while waiting for peas we harvested lots of baby kale leaves from the plants until they exhausted themselves just in time to let the peas take over.

In the fall, we repeated this same "stacking" by planting Brassica seedlings in between tomato plants in the greenhouses several weeks before the end of the tomato harvest. The seedlings had time to set roots while being slightly shaded by the tomatoes. When it came time to remove the tomato vines, we cut them at the base rather than remove them entirely, so as not to disturb the brassicas' roots and to leave the tomato roots to decompose in place and enrich the soil. If crops are rotated, this kind of practice shouldn't cause any problems.

We also sowed kale seeds in along with our mesclun mix in the greenhouses this fall. The mesclun will be sheared back a few times and in the meantime the kale has been growing steadily. When the lettuces are done, the kale will be ready to harvest. With this kind of interplanting, space is not occupied by one crop at a time in a linear fashion, but rather is occupied in a series of overlaps that recognize life is everywhere and all the time.

Next year I plan on interplanting giant sunflowers every six feet in a bed with some other crop. In 2011 they will offer up a crop of cut flowers and in 2012 I will experiment with using their mammoth stalks as tomato stakes and bean poles.

Can all this look messy and unruly? By this point I hope you too will be convinced that this is the wrong question to ask, that it is based in a Euclidean world that life does not know. We live in -- we are a component of -- an unknowably complex world of pattern and function that is dynamic. Let's farm that way!

Farm Art: Mugwort, Garlic, Cayenne Peppers, Artichoke Leaves

The Sky is Falling

The earth is pivoting towards winter and an autumn shift in the world's water is taking place.

In the summer sweat almost steams off our bodies in the fields, heat mirages shimmer off the asphalt, and above the treeline in the distance there is a bluish haze of forest breath licking its way up into the deeper blue of the sky. As the world heads towards the Summer Solstice, everything ascends: peas climb, foxgloves rocket up, sunflowers grow almost visibly. By summer, a world of water has filled the sky and coalesced into massive towers of cloud. Like a flywheel whose momentum slips past the force that set it in motion, thunderstorms erupt and downpours within a day steam back up into a muggy saturated atmosphere only to break again and again like waves against the surface of the earth.


But for the past month the wheel is slowing; the summer sky is falling to the ground. The nights have chilled and in the mornings frost brocades have adorned the ground. By 10 am they're gone with the sun, but each morning they have been appearing and remaining with more insistence. Today there was a long drenching rain, and though there was some thunder it was limpid and resigned compared to its summer cousins. If summer is the high time of cumulus, autumn is a descending time of seeds scattering to earth and leaves falling, and winter is the low time of morning frosts and snow drifts.

                                                  
In a zendo a suspended wooden block is struck with a gnarled branch and it rings out over the course of several minutes in a series of quickening hits. This is the han, used for calling practitioners to meditation and in the evening struck again as the Evening Gatha is chanted:


Let me respectfully remind you.

Life and death are of supreme importance.

Time swiftly passes and opportunity is lost.

Each of should strive to awaken.

Awaken! Do not squander your life.

The han's strikes are like the cycle of water rising in summer and falling in winter. There is rising and falling energy, and the striking of a balance along the course of change. The han has three rounds that read like a ledger or an abacus. In the first a lengthy round of 15 strikes lies on one side of a crescendo and one lonely hit lies on the other. In the second, 8 strikes are paired with two hits. In the final round, three short strikes balance on one side of the crescenedo with three short strikes on the other.


Everything ultimately quiets into balance. The activity of this life seems long at first but it, like the summer world of water in the sky, ultimately rests in equilibrium and in the ground. The water cycle pivots and while working in the fields at the farm, I find myself seeing in the collapse of all the elaborate structures of summer life (in June fireflies filled the night air, now crickets hug the ground with song) an analogue of the pivot in the rest of the world right now.


What is "permaculture?" It combines two concepts: permanence and culture. On the one side is stability, on the other activity. How can we create a realm of activity that can sustain itself indefinitely. Not in some determined, dead way but dynamically, creatively. Like the han's progression from imbalance to balance, I find myself hopeful that the economic turmoil we are lving through is really a slowing down into balance, into a permaculture.

How else to understand pears from Argentina in January but as a version of summer thunderclouds? The pear rises up in an airplane from the foothills of the Andes and comes down again to earth in New York City or Oberlin, Ohio into a supermarket. The amount of energy needed for that trip is like a discharge of lightning in the summer sky. But can we live in an eternal summer?

I come home from the farm where I work listening to NPR and there is always this curious contradictory tension or unease in a lot of financial reporting. The United States and the rest of the world finds itself in such precarious straits because people have been living beyond their means and not saving -- living from paycheck to paycheck. We are like little heat mirages on a summer road, evaporating away in a shimmer of consumerism. And yet in the next breath the radio reporter discusses the recalcitrance of the economy, unable to return to its former glory because no one -- not individuals, banks, or corporations -- is spending. No monumental thunderclouds of activity fill the sky because water (read "money" or even better, "wealth") everywhere is hugging close to the ground, near to home.

Economists everywhere decry this situation but could this be the beginning of true local economies? Rather than a summer world of extravagance, are we heading into autumn and winter? And why would that be so bad after all? Like an excited atom's electrons falling back to their ground state, or like the han in a zendo reminding everyone to wake up to "this" life -- of this human body in this moment in this place -- and live in balance, my hope is that the world is not collapsing but rather settling into billions of nooks and crannies like frost in kernels of soil. There is great work to be done there, each being at work in their own little sphere of activity.

The farm this year has been poor indeed, a model of what is happening in the rest of the world. We've struggled to make ends meet. But as I've written elsewhere, I've devoted a lot of time to harvesting wild foods and expanding the repertoire of what my small community thinks food is. We've dried herbs and dehydrated vegetables as a way of extending the harvest. An open eye allows artichoke leaves and mugwort stems to be transformed into beautiful holiday wreaths laced with cayenne peppers and garlic.

Hunger is a powerful motivator for living a full life and waking up to all that is around you. Summer can often be a time of drowsiness, but the bite of winter sharpens the senses.