Meditation on Love
Jul. 18th, 2003 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormRosemary is for remembrance. It's a woody shrub from the mediterranean where it grows on hillsides that are dry and sunny in the summer and misty and cool in the winter. In a garden it often dies when brought into the artificial heat of the house or alternatively when it's overwatered and overbabied during the summer.
It's prone to mildew in the cold season, though why it goes sometimes and thrives others is a matter of some debate.
Tomatoes are vines. They grow by leaning against support or by running along the ground, sprawling and rooting wherever their stems touch. Theoretically this could create an enormous single plant, rooted in many places, or an enormous clump of interconnected genetically-identical individuals, depending on your taste for the definition of the individual.
The beefsteak tomatoes in the garden here have set fruit; there are little quarter-sized fruits on them, green and tiny. One of them has zipper scarring where the blossom, before falling off, clung to the outside of the fruit. This won't effect taste, only market price, and we'll eat the tomatoes here. The sungold tomatoes set fruit in lovely green sprays long ago and continue to bloom prolifically.
They say that a plant's roots tend to echo the sprawl of the tops; that is, that the leaves of a plant tend to shade the roots, and if you dig there under the spreading branches you'll hit the surface roots. When roots form from the branches this has to be true in at least one sense.
I've never studied a tomato plant left to sprawl. We always cage or stake them here to keep the fruit off the ground; the plants form more perfect fruits, that way, and they're easier to harvest. The Juggler's tomato plants, save one, are sprawling.
I don't know what a wild tomato plant looks like. They're supposed to, at the least, have very small fruit.
In nature the ground is never left bare unless there is something very significant going on. It's covered by sprawling plants, by weeds, by story upon story of plants even when the vegetation is only a foot or two tall overall. There are little creeping things only an inch high, there are broad, flat-leafed plants that settle against the soil to stifle seedlings, there are tall plants that lean on others of their kind, there are taller plants that spear above in solitary glory.
Things come back quickly after a fire; less quickly when the hardpan clay has been disturbed and left on top.
Tall plants need a lot of side roots. The lateral rooting is important to help keep them upright; they don't just go straight down like a mirror of the top but spread in a wide fan for support. All plants react better to being hit hard from above by a jet of water than from the side. They've evolved for rain, not garden hoses. Even the highly-bred ones.
When the soil is left bare the top few inches tend to fluctuate in moisture content very quickly. They're dry, they're wet, they're damp: this isn't very good for roots. In nature two things prevent this from happening: a mulch of dead leaves and plant matter, high in organic content, which retains moisture and protects the soil from wind and sun; and the living leaves and half-dead still-attached leaves of the plants themselves, which shade and cover the soil.
I wonder if tall, mulched plants tend to fall over less than tall, unmulched plants?
We try to replicate nature, some of us, because we think we understand what it does. We think, mulch shades the soil and helps it to retain water, it often adds organic material. We mulch our gardens.
Some of us can continue on that vein, on hearsay or our own observation, or some of us give up on the whys and just see that it's done and try it ourselves.
Growing smaller plants in amongst bigger plants is called companion planting. Growing plants close together so their own leaves shade the ground, in clumps instead of leaving empty rows of soil, has various names but I heard of it first as 'square foot gardening' or 'raised intensive-style beds.'
Sometimes we try to improve on nature. We separate out the chemicals that we know plants want, and we feed those to plants separately from the materials they're found in, in nature. Often that's what we concentrate on: what does the plant want? Hydroponic gardening is one of the ultimate expressions of this, especially the lettuce in BC hothouse.
What does lettuce want? It wants a little space for its roots to anchor it, so we'll put the seedling in a small block of spun-rock foam with no nutrients of its own. Now what does it want? Water, and nutrients. We'll put the blocks of plants in tubes and run water and nutrient solution through it, always circulating. We'll put these tubes in a greenhouse with lots of light, and we'll control the temperature and humidity and maybe even day length.
This can make a happy lettuce plant.
With no variables allowed in 'soil' or greenhouse, it makes for a regular and rather predictable crop, and a livelihood for many people. They survive because of this control. They survive because they know the lettuce plant intimately enough to give it what it wants.
I don't know everything that each of my plants need, chemically, in detail. I take the easier way to garden, one that although it can be disappointing when the cycle comes around feels more worshipful to me. I devote myself, not entirely but when I can, to imitating nature.
I focus, then, on my garden as a whole thing. I look at it and I look out in wild ground, and I think: there are some insects here. There are some holes in the leaves. Plants die sometimes. The soil is rich and black, like chocolate cake, for three or six inches down and then it changes.
Sometimes I improve upon, or change, what I see in nature for the sake of convenience or experimentation. I dig organic matter into my soil, not trusting in the insects to burrow it down for me. I try not to dig too much and slice up the insects that are there, but I do it, once a year, nevertheless.
In this way my garden is a collaboration. There is me, trying things, running around changing the long-established rhythms both by altering the garden itself and by selecting plants that have been bred out of a wild state for generations or even centuries. There is nature, doing (his/her/its?) thing, sending in predators to eat the aphids when there are too many of them, providing sunshine and the force for growth and the disease spores.
I try to learn from this. I try to think about it. I try to see what's happening, to ask why? of my collaborator and get an answer. Why does the garden grow better after a long rain than after a watering? Is it that I'm not watering deeply enough, is it that the rain catches useful airborne nutrients and brings them down, is it the stimulus of repeated tapping on the plants causing them to harden up, is it all of these or none of the above?
My goal is neither to imitate my collaborator perfectly nor is it to understand perfectly. It is not to produce food that looks like the supermarket food, and in fact that is nearly the opposite of my goal. My goal is to learn as much as I can, and to have something which I try to understand, which I care about and nourish, and which responds to my attempts and responds to my increase in knowledge. My goal, also, is to be a part of something bigger than me. No matter how much I learn, how good I get, there will always be more to the garden than me: there will always be things that die, and things that don't fruit. This is acceptance, this is becoming part of the cycle, this is casting off the modern skin which tells me that only perfection and 100%-pure-shiny-plastic-got-all-the-questions-right is useful.
This is accepting that, being given so much learning from a thing, there's a limited amount I can give back. This is accepting an entity as more than the sum of its parts, and not making the mistake of trying to make the individuals perfect to aid the whole.
When I water the garden on a hot day the insects come swarming. Some are neutral, by which I mean they're good or bad depending on whether you see bees as stingers or pollinators. Some are good, like ladybugs, and eat aphids. Some are bad, I suppose, like cabbage moths. They come to drink from the beads of water I leave behind, because in a city there's not too much secret water lying around that's useful to them. Few streams, few ponds: they come to my garden to drink and drink they do.
At home I water from the watering can, and sometimes I put chemical fertiliser in the water. I wonder what happens to them when they drink from that? Have you ever tasted honey made by a bee who drank miracle gro?
It's trite to talk about being part of the web of life. It's trite to talk about the cycle, to say, death is inevitable, we all strive for life, there are consequences to everything, some things get crushed, nothing is perfect. I do see that it's true on a daily basis, and being myself and never having been another I can't say whether that helps in my acceptance of the whole shape of my life or not.
I can say, though, that some days I spend making love to my garden, touching each clod of soil and blade of grass with eyes and hands, smelling deeply of so many different scents and touching an array of textures that varies each time. I can say, not that it always makes me happy, but that it always makes me a part, and thus makes me the whole.
I can say that I am content.
It's prone to mildew in the cold season, though why it goes sometimes and thrives others is a matter of some debate.
Tomatoes are vines. They grow by leaning against support or by running along the ground, sprawling and rooting wherever their stems touch. Theoretically this could create an enormous single plant, rooted in many places, or an enormous clump of interconnected genetically-identical individuals, depending on your taste for the definition of the individual.
The beefsteak tomatoes in the garden here have set fruit; there are little quarter-sized fruits on them, green and tiny. One of them has zipper scarring where the blossom, before falling off, clung to the outside of the fruit. This won't effect taste, only market price, and we'll eat the tomatoes here. The sungold tomatoes set fruit in lovely green sprays long ago and continue to bloom prolifically.
They say that a plant's roots tend to echo the sprawl of the tops; that is, that the leaves of a plant tend to shade the roots, and if you dig there under the spreading branches you'll hit the surface roots. When roots form from the branches this has to be true in at least one sense.
I've never studied a tomato plant left to sprawl. We always cage or stake them here to keep the fruit off the ground; the plants form more perfect fruits, that way, and they're easier to harvest. The Juggler's tomato plants, save one, are sprawling.
I don't know what a wild tomato plant looks like. They're supposed to, at the least, have very small fruit.
In nature the ground is never left bare unless there is something very significant going on. It's covered by sprawling plants, by weeds, by story upon story of plants even when the vegetation is only a foot or two tall overall. There are little creeping things only an inch high, there are broad, flat-leafed plants that settle against the soil to stifle seedlings, there are tall plants that lean on others of their kind, there are taller plants that spear above in solitary glory.
Things come back quickly after a fire; less quickly when the hardpan clay has been disturbed and left on top.
Tall plants need a lot of side roots. The lateral rooting is important to help keep them upright; they don't just go straight down like a mirror of the top but spread in a wide fan for support. All plants react better to being hit hard from above by a jet of water than from the side. They've evolved for rain, not garden hoses. Even the highly-bred ones.
When the soil is left bare the top few inches tend to fluctuate in moisture content very quickly. They're dry, they're wet, they're damp: this isn't very good for roots. In nature two things prevent this from happening: a mulch of dead leaves and plant matter, high in organic content, which retains moisture and protects the soil from wind and sun; and the living leaves and half-dead still-attached leaves of the plants themselves, which shade and cover the soil.
I wonder if tall, mulched plants tend to fall over less than tall, unmulched plants?
We try to replicate nature, some of us, because we think we understand what it does. We think, mulch shades the soil and helps it to retain water, it often adds organic material. We mulch our gardens.
Some of us can continue on that vein, on hearsay or our own observation, or some of us give up on the whys and just see that it's done and try it ourselves.
Growing smaller plants in amongst bigger plants is called companion planting. Growing plants close together so their own leaves shade the ground, in clumps instead of leaving empty rows of soil, has various names but I heard of it first as 'square foot gardening' or 'raised intensive-style beds.'
Sometimes we try to improve on nature. We separate out the chemicals that we know plants want, and we feed those to plants separately from the materials they're found in, in nature. Often that's what we concentrate on: what does the plant want? Hydroponic gardening is one of the ultimate expressions of this, especially the lettuce in BC hothouse.
What does lettuce want? It wants a little space for its roots to anchor it, so we'll put the seedling in a small block of spun-rock foam with no nutrients of its own. Now what does it want? Water, and nutrients. We'll put the blocks of plants in tubes and run water and nutrient solution through it, always circulating. We'll put these tubes in a greenhouse with lots of light, and we'll control the temperature and humidity and maybe even day length.
This can make a happy lettuce plant.
With no variables allowed in 'soil' or greenhouse, it makes for a regular and rather predictable crop, and a livelihood for many people. They survive because of this control. They survive because they know the lettuce plant intimately enough to give it what it wants.
I don't know everything that each of my plants need, chemically, in detail. I take the easier way to garden, one that although it can be disappointing when the cycle comes around feels more worshipful to me. I devote myself, not entirely but when I can, to imitating nature.
I focus, then, on my garden as a whole thing. I look at it and I look out in wild ground, and I think: there are some insects here. There are some holes in the leaves. Plants die sometimes. The soil is rich and black, like chocolate cake, for three or six inches down and then it changes.
Sometimes I improve upon, or change, what I see in nature for the sake of convenience or experimentation. I dig organic matter into my soil, not trusting in the insects to burrow it down for me. I try not to dig too much and slice up the insects that are there, but I do it, once a year, nevertheless.
In this way my garden is a collaboration. There is me, trying things, running around changing the long-established rhythms both by altering the garden itself and by selecting plants that have been bred out of a wild state for generations or even centuries. There is nature, doing (his/her/its?) thing, sending in predators to eat the aphids when there are too many of them, providing sunshine and the force for growth and the disease spores.
I try to learn from this. I try to think about it. I try to see what's happening, to ask why? of my collaborator and get an answer. Why does the garden grow better after a long rain than after a watering? Is it that I'm not watering deeply enough, is it that the rain catches useful airborne nutrients and brings them down, is it the stimulus of repeated tapping on the plants causing them to harden up, is it all of these or none of the above?
My goal is neither to imitate my collaborator perfectly nor is it to understand perfectly. It is not to produce food that looks like the supermarket food, and in fact that is nearly the opposite of my goal. My goal is to learn as much as I can, and to have something which I try to understand, which I care about and nourish, and which responds to my attempts and responds to my increase in knowledge. My goal, also, is to be a part of something bigger than me. No matter how much I learn, how good I get, there will always be more to the garden than me: there will always be things that die, and things that don't fruit. This is acceptance, this is becoming part of the cycle, this is casting off the modern skin which tells me that only perfection and 100%-pure-shiny-plastic-got-all-the-questions-right is useful.
This is accepting that, being given so much learning from a thing, there's a limited amount I can give back. This is accepting an entity as more than the sum of its parts, and not making the mistake of trying to make the individuals perfect to aid the whole.
When I water the garden on a hot day the insects come swarming. Some are neutral, by which I mean they're good or bad depending on whether you see bees as stingers or pollinators. Some are good, like ladybugs, and eat aphids. Some are bad, I suppose, like cabbage moths. They come to drink from the beads of water I leave behind, because in a city there's not too much secret water lying around that's useful to them. Few streams, few ponds: they come to my garden to drink and drink they do.
At home I water from the watering can, and sometimes I put chemical fertiliser in the water. I wonder what happens to them when they drink from that? Have you ever tasted honey made by a bee who drank miracle gro?
It's trite to talk about being part of the web of life. It's trite to talk about the cycle, to say, death is inevitable, we all strive for life, there are consequences to everything, some things get crushed, nothing is perfect. I do see that it's true on a daily basis, and being myself and never having been another I can't say whether that helps in my acceptance of the whole shape of my life or not.
I can say, though, that some days I spend making love to my garden, touching each clod of soil and blade of grass with eyes and hands, smelling deeply of so many different scents and touching an array of textures that varies each time. I can say, not that it always makes me happy, but that it always makes me a part, and thus makes me the whole.
I can say that I am content.
