Everywhere there is life on the move, some of it just barely audible for my ears, gently and unassumingly, though there is much else I at least cannot hear, moving, resting, buzzing, humming, growing, settling, rotting down into the soil, consuming and being consumed. As I work my way slowly through the luxurious tangle of my increasingly sprawling and rather anarchic vegetable garden, picking tomatoes glistening in the morning dew, tugging squash and zucchini out from their leafy refuges, snapping bush beans from their exuberant twining stalks, I keep an eye—and ear—out for the insects, whose presence and habits I have become increasingly occupied with these last few months. It is not hard to observe them: my garden and the field, the margins, and the woods beyond are massively abundant in insects, and in the morning as the sun is still rising and the dew lies heavy the bees and wasps and other pollinators are out in great force, some still sluggish from the night’s cool, lazing along the yellow basins of the pumpkin and squash blooms. As the sun warms their little bundle of energy bodies they take flight to the next bloom, busily supplying their own caloric needs while also ensuring the fruiting of our pumpkins and squashes and tomatoes and all the rest.
We are now three months in to our move to northwest Georgia, a couple miles south of Chattanooga and a mere mile west of the Chickamauga battlefield—where both mine and my wife’s ancestors, incidentally, fought, perhaps each other given her descent from Southern Unionists—and our experiment in cultivating a small farm (well, at this point really a large garden, let’s not get too carried away) is on the whole going well. I am sometimes tempted to look over my little domain of vegetable beds and creeping and crawling pumpkin vines and beans and scattered squashes under the walnut tree and think ‘I built this!’ But while it is true that I have invested a decent amount of labor into our garden enterprise, the real work in my beds and field is that of other living things, on a spectacularly vast scale, from the plants themselves to their pollinating insects and other creatures to the plethora of microorganisms which inhabit the soil. I am at most a coordinator, a steward, directing here and there, building up some of the infrastructure in which the ten thousand things do their work, outside of my control. Being immersed in the workings of natural ‘systems’ and processes one starts to have a glimmer of what Divine providence entails, and the interconnectivity of energies, Divine, human, and natural—but that’s another story for another time.
In terms of practical successes, most of our plantings have done well this year, better than expected honestly. Our planting strategy wasn’t really a strategy: since we moved pretty late in the planting season, it was more a question of sticking stuff in the ground as it was prepared and seeing what grew and what didn’t. Some of our additions were basically random: my wife came across a tomatillo seedling at a nursery and liked the way it looked; it’s been super-productive and is just gorgeous, spilling over the sides of one of our raised beds in the yard. I probably planted more squash and zucchini than necessary, in part because I had overly large bags of seeds I didn’t want to waste. Within a couple days of unpacking I had started raised beds in the yard next to our house, soon followed by in-ground beds in the field; both got a supplement from composted horse manure, and the in-ground beds I’m building up with mulched hay, but otherwise our inputs have been relatively few this year, helped by good soil fertility, nothing but grass having been grown here before, so far as I can tell. There have been a few surprises: I planted the fenceline closest to our house with a mixture of flowers and vegetables, hardy stuff suited for the cherty soil there; and while it all came up and is doing well enough, it turned out that someone, no doubt years ago, had planted cypress vine along the fenceline (or it volunteered itself, who knows!), and cypress vine is very prolific. Fortunately, while it has strangled some of my hardscrabble plantings along the fence, it attracts hummingbirds, so a net benefit.
Given that I didn’t really expect much of anything from our first year of growing, yields have been wonderful and abundant, to the point that I have had to give away the majority of our crop (next year I think we’ll be better equipped to preserve more, for now we’re trying to eat or give away most of what we’re producing). Neighbors, friends, the baristas at the local coffee shop, folks at church—I’ve been pushing fresh vegetables all summer long, and it’s certainly been one of the nicest things about growing produce, being able to supply so many people with healthy food that is also healthy for other living things. We’ve even managed to get our kids to eat some vegetables, the fact that they came from our garden seeming to help.
As I talked about some time back in the lead-up to our move, one of our goals has been reducing our dependence on and use of carbon fuels. There are a lot of reasons to do so: besides the benefits to the overall climate, dense fossil fuels, I’m realizing and noticing more and more as I get older, have had a maladroit shaping effect on so many aspects of human and non-human life far beyond their climatic and other large-scale environmental effects. Our dense carbon infrastructure, particularly here in America, has had wide-scale anti-social, anti-cultural effects, acting as much as an agent of isolation as of connection and communication; some of this is a matter of collective choice, to be sure, and could have been and perhaps still could be otherwise, but some of it is inherent. It’s a bit abstract, but one of the strongest effects of dense carbon fuels is its tendency to, ironically, reduce other forms of density and complexity: compare a sprawling lawn maintained with various fossil fuel inputs to a meadow maintained through manual interventions. The lawn is a shadow of the meadow, its species density and biological complexity vastly reduced, with basically only a couple of layers of life, compared to multiple layers of habitable space in a meadow, layers which only increase with the addition of wild or semi-wild margins.
There is a lot more to be said on this topic, and hopefully I’ll work up the energy and time to do so soon (there are interesting intersections with book history, incidentally). More to the point of this essay, our efforts at reducing fossil fuel use have been mixed. On the one hand, virtually all of our lawn and garden and field labor has been manual: aside from an initial pass over both with gasoline powered mowers, I’ve done all the mowing and trimming with manually powered tools. Materials and inputs have been either produced on our land—hay from our abundant meadow grasses—or sourced from discarded and recycled material. But still I had to drive to get the lumber, the composed manure, the seeds, and so forth, and while we drive a hybrid, it still has to be occasionally filled up. There have been other leakages too: we had to have a large and sadly dying sugar maple cut down professionally, as it leaned far too close to the house for amateurs to tackle, and the crew that did the cutting and chipping was unsurprisingly fully mechanized.
In terms of replacing at least some of our dependence on the industrial agricultural apparatus we’ve made some progress, with a lot to go; that said, while we would like to grow an increasingly large portion of our own food, using our self-production to build local community and connectivity has become more important in our overall vision. We’re moving towards further steps in that direction: for instance, we’re going to install a Little Free Library out along our road frontage, with a little garden space around it; by this time next year there will be, God willing, blackberry and blueberry bushes along the fenceline, available for anyone to pick. We’d also like to turn out currently grass-covered shallow ditch into a bioswale, particularly given that the neighbors downstream periodically suffer from mild flooding. At some point this year we’d like to add chickens to our land, though I’ve been trying to get some other things built and planted first. And finally we need to connect with other people doing basically similar things nearby: there are quite a few other folks in this area cultivating large gardens that approach small farm size, while backyard chickens and roosters are gradually proliferating, with at least two roosters now in audible range of our place. The building blocks of local food systems, of cultural and social renewal, and of ecologically robust and abundant living are everywhere, really—the task for the coming years, here and elsewhere in America, is finding ways to bring them together and to build something beautiful and healthy and good.