patience

Patience my…

patience

I put the hops in this last weekend. We also planted six berry bushes, some asparagus and threw in some lettuce and Arugula for good measure. It feels good to get in the dirt again. I can almost smell the pungent, green buds and the rich red and purple clumps of berries. The asparagus is a different story: it takes years, not months. I threw the dill out in the herb bed and watered the turnips. The seedlings are coming up…all in due time.

If you begin to grow your own food you soon find that doing so is an exercise in patience. While patience is not necessarily a virtue, it is a necessity. This is true with many things and in many situations. Patience is not easy. Everyday I wake up and check the plants, opening the hot house according to the weather (this morning at 6am before work). Coming home, I expect change, but often there is none.

Patience, I am told, becomes a habit with practice. I’ve not found this to be true. Patience, I feel, is often a detriment to good ideas, holding back intuitive blasts of genius. Patience is often accepted as reasonable when it is often cowardly. It is reasonable to wait, when what we mean is that we cannot make a move towards what we know is the right thing. These kinds of decisions and challenges are part of life, but with gardening patience is neither good nor bad, detrimental or progressive, it simply is.

I’ll wait to plant the rest of the garden: the beans, the squash, the onions and leek, the beets, and the tomatoes plus a few other nicknacks.   I will wait, but I won’t be happy about it. I’ll wait to work the soil some (I’m going “till-less” this year), and set the irrigation system up, but the waiting will be long and arduous. Patience is that long journey that we sometimes take, telling ourselves that it is the trip that matters while knowing all the time that it is the destination that really matters.

The Patient Gardener

snow garden

Gardeners tend to regard snow with disdain. The coldness keeps us from going out and feeling the dirt between our fingers. The snow blankets all of our past work and the plants are leafless and lifeless. At least that’s what it looks like. However, there’s a dry spot in my garden out back where I will plant hops this coming spring and I found myself shoveling wheelbarrows of snow onto the spot to bring the soil to life. It is arid during the season and I have always had problems getting things to grow there.

At the end of the day, gardeners are in the business of building up soil and while I was trudging around in my garden the other day in 8” of snow, shoveling the stuff onto my “dry spot”, I was reminded that nothing in nature is without ground; both figuratively and literally. The snow acts as insulation against the raw windy cold. Snow melts slowly into the ground breaking up clods and working manure into the soil. Snow provides moisture over time and gives the soil time to recover from the gardener’s incessant need to interfere with what nature does best.

This last point is the cornerstone of a subject that I have become more and more interested in: permaculture. It seems to go against the concept of gardening itself: just leave it alone. I have found that it helps to remember that we are not really managers as much as stewards. That answering the question “How?” does not answer the question “Why?” As a gardener, I want to produce food and resources for food. I want hops not because hops are somehow inherently good, but because I love beer and want to make beer that tastes good. Hops makes beer taste good!

However, permaculture does not dismiss our utilitarian desires. Rather, it reminds us that our utilitarian desires need to be limited by the resources that we actually have and the resources that we actually have can be more than enough…as long as we don’t get greedy. It takes patience not to be greedy.

Snow forces us to be permaculturists rather than gardeners in the true sense of the word: work intentionally and don’t do too much and don’t take too much. It’s funny that we have to be taught these things as they seem to be self-evident. Maybe the lesson to be learned is: gardening is easy if you have patience, but being patient makes gardening difficult. I, for one, find that to be true anyway.