Although I Have No Place to Garden

Gabriel Jimenez @gabrielj_photography

Although I have no place to garden, I continue to study all I can. Always, when I had the farm, winter was a time for re-grouping, planning, assessing was worked and what did not—what I missed and want to remedy, etc… The seeds arrive. I think of succession and draw. I read about compost and teas and mulches and microsystems—ground covers and companions…bugs and worms, fungi and bacteria. I get so excited when I return to this phase of gardening: it is so new, so fresh…after months of “sleepy” non-soil time.

This year, I return to Gaia’s Garden by Tony Hemenway. “What does die each year is recycled within the ecosystem, with almost no loss. Nearly all of life’s products, from tree trunks and deer bones down to insect wings and bacteria cells, are recyclable. Nature assembles and breaks down, dissolves and renews, using the same material over and over, leaving no landfills and toxic dumps in her wake. In nature, there is not such thing as waste. Everything is food for something else, connected in life and death to many other species.”

So good! So miraculous! So perfect.

So, I study to remind myself to honor this: to replenish as I reap (even in my haste to harvest). To recall the nature of nature—and nourish it. I smile from ear to ear at the thought: back in the dirt, on my knees, covered with soil. I love the soil as someone loves the sand and the beach. Take me there…