Homestead Hermitage and Gardens

Autumn Air

2008-10-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

Although we don’t have a lot of color in the trees, October is a beautiful month in lower Alabama. During early October our evening temperatures fall into the lower 60’s and during the day the mercury makes its way into the lower to mid 80’s. A few days see the lows in the upper 50’s and highs in the mid 70’s. That doesn’t sound like much to shout about, especially if you live somewhere north of the Mason Dixon Line. But here in Zone 8b it’s a long awaited relief from the dismal summer heat and humidity of the Deep South.

Most of the sweet potato farmers have harvested their crops. Peanut farmers are digging goobers. Huge bales of cotton are being hauled to the gins. The last remnants of summer gardening are the occasional stands of okra that you see here and there. Ours played out long ago. Had I kept it faithfully picked it would still be producing and would until frost. I admit that I have a hard time picking okra when its 95 degrees with the same percentage of humidity, especially after working all day taking care of client’s lawns. At that time of day the only things I’m interested in are a shower and the air-conditioning.

October ushers in new adventures in the garden. It’s time to put in cool weather crops. We have beds full of collards, chard, cabbage, mustard greens, turnips, broccoli, onions, and lettuce. These are growing nicely and looking good. We started putting in cool weather crops during late September during a terrible drought. That meant irrigating to get transplants established and seeds sprouted and growing.

We are also doing some experimental gardening. In early September, the last of the potatoes that we dug in June were planted in two rows. They’ve been hilled up once now and if we can keep the first couple of early frosts off of them they should make eating potatoes. I think it was the last week in August that I planted three rows of sweet corn, two rows of bush-type green beans, and three types of squash.

These crops germinated and came up well but insects in this sub-tropical zone have presented a fierce problem in growing corn and squash as a fall crop. I can’t blame them. If I were a bug I think I’d rather chew on something sweet and juicy instead of scrounging for lunch on a bunch of dry, hard fare. They’re not stupid and know a good deal when they find it. A couple weeks ago I almost put the tiller to the squash but somehow managed to constrain myself. It’s blooming now. Most of the corn is between waist and chest high and it’s beginning to tassel. The beans are loaded with blooms and should have no problem making before the first frost hits.

October also happens to be a teaching month for us. Back in the spring we were asked to teach a gardening class as part of the adult education program at St. Lawrence Catholic Church. Thirteen people attended the first session of the class. That was really encouraging. Before the week was over we had a call from a newly formed local food grower’s initiative that is trying to get the local city officials to allow them to use municipal property for a community garden. They are also involved in several other worthwhile local food production endeavors. One of their members had attended our first Monday night session and had encouraged their group to invite us to come and give a talk on gardening at their November meeting. How could I not accept the invitation to talk about this passion?

There are a lot of food concerns afoot these days, what with all the talk about GMO’s, pesticide contamination, salmonella poisoning, rising transportation and distribution costs. The more we know, the more we educate ourselves about these concerns, the more motivation we discover within ourselves to do something more than just talking about the problems. Home gardens and grass roots projects may never change the massive problems on the large scale. They do, however, create a major difference in the lives of those involved in them.

Reclaiming the Soil

2008-09-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

Gardening, for us, is a way of life. It is a reflection of who we are personally and of our interest to live in cooperative harmony with creation. It’s not merely about growing vegetables to eat or flowers to look at although these are gifts that we both appreciate and depend upon. Gardens give so much more than food to the ones that tend them. They have much to teach us if we will only listen as they speak to us from deep within the soil and the host of life that its own life supports.

The little parcel that we affectionately know as Homestead Hermitage and Gardens was at one time part of a several hundred acre farm located near the small farm where I grew up as a child. In my mind I can recall memories of it and the family that farmed this land. When we moved in, it had been at least thirty years since the soil has seen a plough, since it had last been tilled. Where tractors once worked the fields and cattle grazed in pastures, now there are only the signs of growing populations and urban sprawl. What was once a productive parcel of land has, over time, become compacted and hard. It is covered with a dense, thick sod with gnarly roots that grow three to four inches deep, a tenacious native grass that, like urban sprawl, crawls over everything growing in its path.

Reclaiming a piece of this soil, conditioning and returning it to a productive state, has been no light task. Dealing with this thick layer of sod is a challenge within itself. Below the sod, and a few sparse inches of top soil, lies a hardpan that even a heavy modern tiller can’t easily chew its way through. I’ve looked for short cuts and easier ways to go about solving this problem but I’ve found none. You simply have to work at it until you get through it. To create an environment that supports healthy, productive garden life involves a serious personal commitment that includes levels of manual labor shunned by most people in our modern go-grab-something-at-the-store society.

Creating a hospitable environment for healthy growth is a tremendous challenge in life. There are so many conditioning variables that beat upon us, circumstances that, bearing down upon us, work to complicate and compact the delicate soil of our lives. It’s altogether easier to yield to the currents that flow around us than it is to cut our own channels, to launch out into unfamiliar waters, to brave the rigors of terrain too treacherous for those weak of heart and feeble in spirit. Yet, deep within the soil of our beings, woven within the fabric of our souls, resides a wanderlust searching for freedom, a yearning for release from the smothering, restricting roots and overgrowth of the artificial selves that we, and others, have made of us.

Aspiration may indeed begin in moments of inspiration as small rays of light penetrate our consciousness through awakening epiphanies. It can also begin in moments of desperation, particularly when you begin to realize the shape that modern agriculture is in. But aspiration alone, faith without work, will never render intended precious fruit in our lives. We must diligently consecrate our selves, devote our selves, to the task of breaking up the hardpan in the soil of our souls so that the seeds sown by epiphanies, carried to us by the wind of the Spirit, can find a soft, fertile seedbed. Here they find a hospitable environment where they can germinate, sprout, and grow into their intended fruit in our lives.

Respect for Mystery

2008-09-08T15:30:00.000-07:00

“The task of preserving the life of the world has little to do with the present values of American society. It has almost nothing to do with our concepts of wealth and profit and success and luxury and ease. It has nothing at all to do with short-term investments, or short-term anything else. It is not recognizable to a short-term intelligence. It involves us in work that we can never live to finish nor imagine the end of. It is humble work, often involving the use of the hands. It requires respect for mystery.”[1]

To lose our respect for mystery is to lose our sense of place in creation. Creation, after all, came before humans in the natural order of things. Both creation science and evolution science may fall out of agreement on how creation came to be and on points of morality but, on the point of place in the natural order of things, these two sciences are in agreement. First came the earth. Then came physical life and that includes us humans.[2]

The account is a beautiful story, one of perfectly formed humans placed in a pristine, perfectly formed garden designed to perpetually supply everything the two could possibly need. They were commissioned to pro-create, to participate in bringing their kind into the garden. They were assigned a task of dominion: tend the garden as ambassadors on assignment, as stewards entrusted with a sacred trust.

They were surrounded by the pristine beauty of the mystery of creation and visited by the Supreme Intelligence that brought it all into being. We know and refer to this Supreme Intelligence as God. It is, after all, the name that he prefers to use, a name that we are cautioned against using lightly or in vain lest we show disrespect for the greatest of Mysteries.[3]

Their fall from grace is often described as an act of disobedience resulting from pride, something that has consequently affected all of humanity[4], and we all live with the unleashed contents of the Pandora’s Box opened at the genesis of human life. The idea that a “forbidden fruit” was picked and eaten is essentially a testament declaring that their respect for mystery was forsaken and, once forsaken, their sense of place in creation was lost. There is really a logical sense to the process. When respect for mystery is forsaken, a sense of place in creation is lost, and the accumulative effects are always adverse.[5]

The process will always be degenerative, always regressive, regardless of how promising it may appear on the surface, in the short-term. “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation … even if it requires skin as thick as pine bark.”[6] In this age of modernism, characterized by deforestation, mountain top removal, nuclear and chemical contamination of the global environment, depletion of the ozone layer, global warming, the introduction of genetically modified plant organisms and animal growth hormones into the food chain, it would do us well to revisit the Law of a much earlier people in the hope of rediscovering respect for mystery for the sake of preserving life.

[1] Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness, p. 29
[2] Genesis 1:1-26
[3] Exodus 20:7
[4] Romans 5:12
[5] Genesis 3
[6] Great Law of the Iroquois

Photo: Little Swartzwood Lake, Newton, NJ

Blissful Ignorance

2008-09-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

“Population will increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ‘ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.” Abraham Lincoln

Imagination is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome in returning to a lifestyle that is in tune with nature. Most people simply can’t imagine themselves doing the work that’s involved. It’s altogether easier to sell ourselves into subservience to the USDA and the machinery of modern agribusiness, two mega-entities that I find it terribly difficult to trust, especially when I look at their track records.

It was, after all, the USDA that told us things like DDT, Dieldrin, Toxaphene, Parathion, Diazinon, and a host of other chemicals were safe to use. And it is the world of modern agribusiness and the chemical industries that are neck deep in genetically modifying the plants that produce the food we eat and in converting the raw stock into what is being sold as something purported to be healthy food despite its biologically altered and chemically laden qualities.

When those “approved” poisons proved too dangerous to the environment, something that includes and affects human beings, they were yanked from the shelves only to be replaced with other poisons that the chemical industries and the USDA says are safe to bathe food crops with if used according to their directions. How does the old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

GMO’s are a new deck of cards being dealt us. The USDA and the profiteering peddlers of GMO’s tell us there is nothing to worry about. It’s rather interesting, though, to read the findings of a host of independent scientists, both here in this country and around the world, findings that more than suggest that the aberrations being created in laboratories are pills that no person or animal should swallow.

The evidence more than suggests that the GMO cards are marked with the skull and crossbones. These genetically modified plants are surrounded with concerns. The concerns don’t stop with the original product. There is an environmental concern regarding what happens in the plant world when genetically modified plants cross pollinate with uncorrupted plants. The buck sadly doesn’t stop in the plant world either. There is considerable evidence that genetic engineering in food crops is negatively impacting human heath.

Awareness is not the same thing as paranoia. Despite the chances of being labeled “paranoid,” something that I’m not, I’d much rather be thought of as a paranoid person than to walk through this greed and profit driven world of big business blissfully ignorant of what’s taking place around me. I might otherwise find myself waiting in line for a dousing of “safe” DDT. Yeah. It easily got rid of the bedbugs and lice … but at what long range cost to people and the environment surrounding them?

I can imagine Mr. Lincoln doing simple arithmetic with a stubby pencil by the warm glow of an oil lamp and scratching his bearded chin in amazement at how American society would increase over the years. I can also imagine him eyeing, studying, and envisioning how agricultural practices of future generations would feed such a large populace. At the same time, in my imagining, I find it interesting that though he measured the growth in population in large figures he didn’t even hint at the idea that it would be large government subsidized mega-farms that would feed the hungry masses.

Photo: Our deck garden (2002) in New Jersey

Late August

2008-08-26T05:03:00.000-07:00

“Producing some of our own food should be as much a part of life as cooking food for ourselves.”[1]

Summer in the Deep South is long, humid and hot. It’s the kind of heat that you really don’t get accustomed to, it’s more something that you learn to endure knowing that our autumn will be long and our winter short and mild. In the garden, field peas and okra are about the only things that thrive, other than the weeds and grass.

The garden crops, planted in the spring, play out, thankfully I might add, as the heat and humidity begin climbing into the ridiculous zone. Life, where gardening is concerned for us, pretty much goes into maintenance mode during the summer. During the summer we focus on doing only what has to be done outside while waiting for cooler weather to work on improvements. There are, of course, those things that come along that provoke us to activity. One of these provocative occasions was getting a coop set up for four mature laying hens that became our happy hermitage hens this summer.

Most of our spring garden did really well this year, the exception being the watermelons and cantaloupes that put on an abundance of blooms but refused to set fruit. We find that a little strange since we’ve never had that problem before and there were plenty of honey bees around doing what bees do best. Our sweet potatoes were a disappointment this year too.

We didn’t count the bags of produce that we gave away but it amounted to bushels of high quality fresh garden vegetables. As well as all that we could eat fresh and give away, we canned 28 quarts of green beans, a cooker full of carrots, froze 14 quarts of sweet corn, and we are still eating from a wash tub that was full of beautiful potatoes that were dug in late May. We grazed on tomatoes in the garden until we were tired of tomatoes and never once succumbed to salmonella.

Gardening in the Deep South is something that goes on year round. Spring crops can be reseeded in late summer for a fall crop. In late September and October we sow cool weather crops that will grow through the winter months. The personal dynamics created by the temperature changes, as well as a change in diet, are the biggest difference. It’s always pleasant to be out sowing in March but it’s hotter than the blazes of you-know-where when you are out there digging potatoes, picking beans and squash, or pulling corn with the southern sun beating down on you in late May and June. Late August and early September aren’t the most pleasant times of the year to be in the garden tilling and planting. It’s still awful hot but we do it anyway knowing that October and November are delightful months in the garden.

So here we go playing in the garden again, digging in the soil, getting earth under our fingernails. Wendell Berry, writing the forward for Living at Nature’s Pace, says that “farming is an encounter, not with an idea but with a place.” I’d like to add to Berry’s statement by saying that this is especially true in micro-farming, particularly when we view what we are doing as participating in the process of life as caretakers of a valuable trust, one that must be rescued and safeguarded from the ravaging economic machinery of modern day agribusiness.

[1] Gene Logsdon, Living at Nature’s Pace, p. xi

Photo: Amish family in Eastern TN

A Life-Sharing Relationship

2008-05-29T05:13:00.000-07:00

Apostolic gardening involves much more than manipulating a piece of earth in order to secure a living from it. The relationship is much more personal and intimate. It is not simply a matter of hurriedly wielding machines and tools as though they inherently possessed some warranty of success. It is a relationship that involves living and dying, working and resting, giving and receiving, caring for and being cared for. It is a connecting relationship, one that leads us toward entering into where we begin understanding the connection between our own personal health and the health of the earth that sustains life.

I’m not talking about some kind of new-age poppycock with its Gaean worship. We do, however, need to see and experience our relationship with the earth more intimately than most in our technocratic age do. Most people in westernized society have no concept of what is involved in living in partnership with the earth though the whole of every society depends upon its bounty.

“Somewhere along the road of history man began to pollute fields and rape this planet with his greed and with a technology that is sometimes used to pervert what God had intended for us. Earth and water are defiled with all kinds of things that do not belong in them, and people have become unhealthy, eating junk food and greed-motivated, polluted food products.”[1]

Doherty, born a Russian noblewoman, was a refugee of the 1917 communist movement. She founded Friendship Houses prior to founding Madonna House in the rural village of Combermere, Ontario in 1947. She died in 1985. Her Catholic faith is evident in the life she lived. She was also something of a visionary, garnering from the signs of her times, seeing the direction that humankind was taking. Her council is well worth listening to. Her example is well worth emulating.

I always find the reaction a little amusing when we decline an invitation to go someplace or do something because we have work to do in the gardens. There is an expression that a lot of “non-gardeners” get on their faces, one that boldly declares their lack of understanding and appreciation of this connecting relationship.

Seedtime, harvest, and processing come when they do. We can somewhat plan for them but it’s impossible to pre-schedule them to accommodate our own plans and interests, or the plans and interests of others. We are, in a very practical sense, united in a process of life-sharing with these three, a relationship that involves much more than opening our mouths as the gateway to our stomachs.

[1] Catherine Doherty, Apostolic Farming, p. 56

Seasons

2008-05-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

“The earth never hurries … and if a man makes her ill he has to apologize to her, beg her forgiveness, and start all over again to make her well and fruitful. Sometimes it takes four generations to restore the soil that has been hurt by one generation.”[1]

It was a beautiful place for a boy to grow up. That little 100 acre farm seemed like a big place with its mix of fields and woods where two small water sheds converged and made their way southward toward one of the creeks at the lower end of Fish River. The back part of the farm once belonged to my grandparents. They worked it with mules when they started out and I enjoy listening to the stories my mom tells about her days as a young girl growing up.

After my mom and dad married they bought the forty where they built their home and later acquired the rest of the farm from the grandparent’s estate after mom’s folks passed on. It was all fertile soil, cross fenced to allow for soil, crop, and livestock management. I don’t know if the old timers two generations back tossed such definitions around in their conversations. I think it was something that was just common sense with them and the idea of mechanized mega-farming wasn’t even a thought. Farming may have involved a lot more manual labor in those days but it was done much more casually with human hands tending the soil and touching the fruit of the earth. Those were days when farm life was lived in a much less harried and hurried fashion.

Terms such as subsistence farming and sustainable agriculture weren’t part of my grandparent’s vocabulary. They did however grow to eat and their land was kept fit and healthy. Their stewardship of the land was their food insurance.

Seasons come and go. Fashions come and go. So goes the family farm. Over the years my dad tore out the cross fences. The smaller fields made it difficult to maneuver the old pull behind two-row combine and one-row corn picker that became part of our family small farm scene. Larger fields meant less time spent turning around at the ends of rows. Taking out the grown up fence rows meant a few more acres of tillable land that would produce a few more bushels that would bring a few more dollars. Poor livestock management resulted in a pitiful herd of rake-straw cows and a mess of scrawny piney woods rooter hogs. Grazing off all the stubble rather than plowing it under, along with a few other poor soil management practices resulted in farmed out and practically lifeless dirt.

The old Russian peasant farmer’s diagnosis that Mrs. Doherty talks about rings loud and true in my ears. The picture that he paints is vivid and clear in my sight. I see the black hearse. I hear the toll. It takes only one generation to ruin the earth and I fear that we’ve already experienced the generation that has dealt a hand of sickness to its heirs and their subsequent heirs. The plight of that little 100 acre farm is a microcosm of a problem that reaches far beyond the borders of this once rural county. It’s a problem that stretches across this continent, one that is now being duplicated world over by the modern regime known as agri-business.

Yesterday our four hens gave us four eggs. After picking this handful of hen-fruit I planted organic sweet potato sets that we ordered from an organic farm in Tennessee and also some sets that we grew ourselves. While puttering around in the garden I noticed that the okra is coming up. For dinner we loaded our plates with fresh potatoes, beets, and steamed squash that came from the garden. We enjoyed the sumptuous dining on the screened porch where we could see and hear the sights and sounds of Creation.

Four years ago our first attempts at growing food were very disappointing. Gradually, with constant attention and care at growing soil, our gardens are lush and have begun to yield abundantly. It’s a new season for this little spot of earth that we’ve affectionately dubbed Homestead Hermitage and Gardens, a season that I’ll dare to say can be replicated anywhere someone has a little spot of earth and a lot of ambition.

Does it take four human generations to turn a plot of land around once it’s sick? Not necessarily. But it does take several earth seasons. It takes a few years of earth friendly practices – time and effort that are immensely rewarding in a number of ways.

[1] Catherine Doherty, Apostolic Farming, p. 16

The Only Oasis

2008-04-27T17:46:00.001-07:00

Unless something in another solar system resembles this planet, Earth is the only oasis in infinity where the likes of us people-folk can get a drink of cool water, sit in the shade of a tree, watch the gardens grow, and listen to the songs of the birds. It really is quite the place that we share here as fellow residents. I can’t help but to think that, rather than arising on its own out of some primeval chaos, it is structured and built with Intentional Forethought by a careful and capable Designer.

I’m comfortable with this conclusion and admit that the ideas of Creation and moral/social/environmental accountability, despite the good sense of them, make a lot of people uncomfortable. Some conclusions do create what appear to be irreconcilable differences that cause people to alter the direction of their lives in ways that establish borders and barriers between them. In some ways this is a sad reality. In other ways it is a safe one.

Perhaps I’m too much in agreement with Tolstoy but I’m comfortable with this as well. This is one reason that I can’t agree wholeheartedly with Walter Wink and his theology for a new millennium.[1] I simply can’t muster the faith to believe that the present state of economic, political, and consumeristic affairs are redeemable. I agree that they need to be redeemed and set on a more humanly compassionate and earth-conscious course. I think, however, that these systems are too far gone, too embedded within themselves, to be salvaged on a global scale.

It makes more sense to me to divorce ourselves from social and environmental injustices and support or create alternatives that treat people and the environment with the compassion and care they deserve. I don’t however think we will ever be able to completely divorce ourselves from the system. But we can lessen our dependence upon it. We can in large ways return to lifestyles that generate rather than merely consume. The more this is done at the local level the more impact it has on the global level. It’s not going to turn the world around in a year but it will certainly quickly turn us around as individuals and it will definitely affect people within our close concentric circles of influence.

This takes measures of time and commitment that in my opinion most people aren’t willing to give. We can’t spend our time worrying about what most people think or do. Maybe it would be more appropriate to put this … what most people don’t think and don’t do. If we wait for the crowd we’ll be waiting a long time. If we think everyone is going to get on the bus we’re going to be surprised when we find most of the seats empty. If we are waiting for big business to approve of what we are doing we simply prove ourselves to be the fools that they think we are anyway. Their unjust golden rule is not the one we are directed to live by.

I walk around the gardens every day. Sometimes several times a day. I enjoy watching them grow, keeping watch over their progress and development, making mental notes of how things look and what needs doing. There is a sense of interaction that takes place, degrees of joint participation. Apostolic gardening is not just about growing something to eat. Nor is it about fostering irreconcilable differences. It’s a process that is constantly teaching. It’s a style of life. It is the basis for stewardship of this oasis called Earth and of ourselves as tenders of it – something that all of us should take seriously, something that should create agreement rather than dissension. It is, after all, the only oasis.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be, © Augsburg Fortress, 1998

Whittlin'

2008-04-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

The big name in corn flakes has announced that it will begin using genetically modified sugar in its cereals. I guess they think that is something to crow about. The people at the head of Sam’s Club made the decision to limit the amount of rice that people can buy for fear that food hoarding was happening. Diesel fuel is now up to $4.16. Regular gas is $3.60.

Last evening I took a peek at two little feathered out Bluebirds that are growing off nicely in the bird box in our front yard as I strolled about looking at the gardens and hoping to catch a glimpse of the Indigo Bunting that we see once in a great while. They don't seem to be alarmed about the price of oil, the crisis in the housing market, or the fact that most people have no idea about what goes into the stuff they shovel into their mouths.

Several days ago there was a massive mechanical rig that I saw planting sweet potatoes in an eighty acre sandy field about a mile from here. Most of the farm land for several miles around us has been converted to sub-divisions and acreages with large homes. Conventional farming is nearly a thing of the past in this county, a place that once abounded with small truck farms and a rail line that hauled the locally grown produce to points north.

It’s sad to see it happen but I really can’t blame farmers for opting to sell their land for what they are getting for it these days. Conventional farming has become risky business. It takes only one bad year for a farm to go belly up. But as they disappear so also vanishes a lifestyle that is an important part of the fabric of any community, of every society – a lifestyle that is extremely difficult to restore once it is lost. It seems rather obvious to me that life in the 21st Century is life being lived upside down and we’ve hung from our feet for so long that we have grown comatose as a society of modern people.

There is a temptation to berate the institutions and industries that have become the real governors of modern economy. Modern conditions are what they are and won’t change simply because I stomp my feet and cuss at them. (I admit that I do some of both of these.) It’s more productive to keep whittlin' away at developing something here that offers more than a modicum of assurance where our table fare is concerned. The gardens are happy. The birds are happy. The roses are beginning to bloom. Life is good.

Late April is a beautiful time of year in lower Alabama. Mornings are cool with temperatures in the upper 50’s and lower 60’s. Afternoons are quite warm, enough so that you don’t have to do much exerting to generate a good sweat. By this time next month we'll be sweating when the sun comes up and wondering when the first hurricane will develop. It’s time to plant okra and field peas.

Vocational Gardening

2008-04-16T05:05:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit that we enjoy gardening. The whole process is interesting and we are challenged by the idea of personal sustainable small-scale agriculture. Working in the soil, learning to cooperate with, and at times assisting nature, is such an integral part of our lives here at Homestead that we’ve come to understand it as something vocational, a calling that we can’t ignore. We believe, in part, that we are called to return to a simpler mode of living that has largely been set aside by most people in our modern society.

Vocation is an important but neglected word in our language. It provides definition to our personal being and direction in life. It goes beyond feeling and imagination, although these senses may have some bearing upon it in its early stages. But, as it develops, it concerns itself more with reason and will. In the secular world vocation has evolved to be accepted as what a person does, for any number of reasons or motivations, to secure a chosen lifestyle. In the religious world it has always been applied to certain religious professions. In its simplest evaluation, it has to do with who we really are, with understanding our true identity, and pursuing our true identity regardless of what others may think of our self-realization and choice.

The great challenge and difficulty found here is discerning the difference in the true identity inherent within us and the false identity imposed upon us by society and its cultural norms. Personally, the perception that I have of modern culture is one that tends toward responses governed by imagination and feeling. It seems to me that reason and will often have less to do with choices in modern society now than at any other time in history.

A will that is exercised based upon good reasoning will avoid mistakes in judgment created by imagination and feeling. Not that imagination and feeling are evil. Just because it feels good doesn’t necessarily mean that it is good though. It’s also easy to imagine a false identity and live as legends in our own minds. We need to remember that it was the unchecked senses of imagination and feeling that got the original Garden Couple into trouble. Left unchecked, left without the counter-balance of sound reason and will, imagination and feeling will also get us into trouble.

There are a host of valid reasons for growing a garden and each of these valid reasons has a role in answering why we garden. We admit that we aren’t content with the way food crops are grown in the “production” world. We believe there are too many pesticides and herbicides used in the process of growing food crops. We admit that we are not at all comfortable eating genetically modified food crops as though we were mice in a testing program. We do enjoy eating fresh vegetables that taste better than anything found in the produce section at the stores in town.

These are all valid surface reasons cited by many that grow gardens. But our reason for gardening has deeper roots, roots that reach deep into the definition of vocation itself. Gardening is a part of who we are, not just something that we do. It is not just a deliberate act of defiance toward those that grow for the canneries and market suppliers or against the chemical industries and those involved in genetic modification. It is more an act of personal surrender, an act of will based on reason in the process of our own self-realization - self-realization that responds to a higher calling.

Don't Listen To The Bumble Bee

2008-04-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

When the southern summer heat and humidity are oppressive in June through August, those months when okra and field peas thrive, we have to remind ourselves that those few summer months are part of the price we pay for the pleasure of being able to garden year round.

With a little bit of forethought and action something can be growing in the garden all the time. A little more action in the form of processing puts food from our gardens on our table during times when certain crops don’t grow. It’s really nice to pull a gallon freezer bag of mustard greens or collards out of the freezer in August and green beans and potatoes out of quart jars in January.

Our gardens are really showing off this time of year. This picture was taken in early March. It’s early April now and there’s more growing than we can possibly eat fresh. The collards, kale, chard and beets that we planted back in late fall have been gracing our table all winter with salads and cooked greens. A few weeks ago we started adding fresh spinach to our salad mix. If we got really ambitious we could grub for small “new potatoes” from rows that we planted in February.

The eight rows of sweet corn that we planted the second week in March are about 8 inches tall. Butternut, yellow and green squash, cucumbers, watermelon and cantaloupe are up and off to a good start. Yesterday morning we noticed that the four rows of green beans that we planted less than a week ago had started breaking the ground. This morning there are four well defined rows telling us that we’ve got a good stand from seed that we purchased last year.

We lost some of our tomato plants this week from damping off. That’s the first time this has happened to us. They would have been our early tomatoes and we’ll have to bite the bullet and buy a few plants to replace them. There are still plenty of other tomato plants coming along in the green house but they were sown later and they are still small. Eggplant and pepper plants, still growing in the green house, look really good.

In March people start getting gardening crazy in this part of the world. Nighttime temperatures start settling out in the fifties and during the day we start getting some regular temperatures in the mid seventies. When I was a kid growing up we were taught to wait until we saw the first bumble bee before going bare foot. It may be warm enough to throw off the shoes but March seems to always hold some climate surprises in store here on the southern coast. It’s not uncommon to get some freezing weather that makes the early birds go back to the store for more plants. After all, the azaleas, wisteria, and dogwoods are heralding the arrival of spring. We still stand a chance for a little frost in April though so we are waiting another week or two before we start setting out tomato, pepper, and eggplant.

Reclaiming Ourselves

2008-03-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

“To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” Mahatma Ghandi

It is really difficult for me to talk about gardening without coming around to the philosophical base that resides at the heart of what we are doing here. At the very natural level, the level that is most obvious to casual onlookers, we are growing food. We are, in a sense, subsistence gardening. At a deeper level, the level that is lost to most human beings in westernized culture, we are simply realizing and remembering who we are and what we are about despite the trends and fantasies of the modern culture that surrounds us.

This deeper level is not profit motivated. It doesn’t look at a bell pepper or carrot and ask how much are you worth in dollars and cents? It doesn’t register the minutes and hours spent digging and tending. There are no time cards or time clocks. We don’t punch in and out. The giving and receiving is of a much different sort, one involving a deeply intimate relationship that includes a trinity of sorts – ourselves, creation, and Creator. This, I think, is the line that is drawn between conventional gardening/farming and apostolic gardening/farming regardless of the scale of the project. Scale and scope are entirely different entities. The first has more to do with what we are doing. The second has more to do with why we are doing it.

Self-sufficiency, sustainability, subsistence – these do wear earmarks that some consider radical and reactionary. These aren’t really such radical and reactionary concepts though when we become honest and careful students of history and begin to see what mechanization, industrialization, and urbanization have wrought – only a few are left to feed the hungry masses who, according to the wisdom of Ghandi, have forgotten themselves. The concepts aren’t historically radical and reactionary. They are embedded in the very fabric of humanity from the beginning of time where man was given a garden to dress and care for.

Re-implementing these historical concepts in an age that ignores and neglects them is easy to dream about, easy to talk about. The actual doing of the thing really takes a lot of gumption though, more I’ll dare say than most people in our modernized culture are able to muster. Things are getting serious these days though. There are plenty people who are concerned about the safety, quality, and availability of food crops and these are intelligent, educated people working to produce good food and raise awareness. People are wise to listen and think seriously about these issues.

These are important issues, life issues that concern all of us, issues that can be more than a little scary when you begin looking at them through objective lenses. These are issues that concern lifestyle choices. They aren’t so much about changing what we eat as they are about changing the way we think and live. There is nothing superficial or cosmetic about this. It is deeply heart centered. When we take shovel and hoe in hand and begin digging and tending the earth we honestly begin reclaiming something. That something is our own original selves.

Time, Space, Interest, and Motivation

2008-03-17T05:33:00.000-07:00

A few more pennies increase and it will cost four dollars a gallon to put diesel in my old 82 Chevy truck. A decent loaf of store bought bread, if it can even be called that, is already four bucks a loaf. Four for a dollar canned vegetables are a thing of the past. A hand full of fresh collard greens, just enough to make me want more and not enough to deserve turning on an eye on the stove, goes for three bucks. A little bag of salad fixings is four bucks and there’s no way of knowing what it was grown in, what toxic chemicals were sprayed on it, and when or who had their hands on it before it got to the produce isle.

The last little five pound sack of potatoes that I bought added up to about a dollar a pound. I’m not sure why I bought it since we’ve still got plenty of canned potatoes from last year.

There’s not much that we can do about the price of diesel. The old truck is paid for, as are all three of our older vehicles, so when we stack up the dollars and cents of the matter it really doesn’t make sense to saddle ourselves with payments on something newer and smaller. We’ve resolved, like a lot of other people who feel like they are being held over an oil barrel, to continue supporting the petroleum industry in one degree or another even though the whole fossil fuel thing is alarming.

There is, however, a lot that we can do where the food that we eat is concerned and we are doing it. The more we do it the more seriously we take what we are doing especially when we consider all that’s going on with the economy, the environment, and the way food crops are being grown.

I bought seed potatoes for 30 cents a pound in February. Bulk garden seeds are extremely inexpensive. A little loose change buys a lot of seeds at the local feed and seed store.

Those small pretty packets can tally up a pretty good price tag. So can using mail order seed suppliers. Sometimes we can’t resist the pretty pictures on the packets and some things simply can’t be gotten locally, especially when you are looking for organically grown heirloom seeds. For the most part we stay away from hybrid seeds opting for open pollinated varieties for a number of reasons. Why pay two dollars for a tablespoon of turnip seeds when you can get the same amount of seeds for a quarter? The people at the feed and seed store will sell you a big scoop or a little scoop.

Nine dollars buys a pound of sweet corn seed as long as you stay with the older varieties. The more modern hybrids cost more. We buy a half pound. That’s a lot of seed and we always have seed left over. Leftovers are not a problem though. They will be good next year. Seeds are hardly little things as long as you keep them dry and comfortable between times.

Ten dollars will plant a lot of vegetables, more than you can eat as they come in. The extra can be given to friends, canned, or frozen. We eat a lot fresh, give a lot away, can and freeze a lot. Even at that there’s always a lot that gets tossed into the compost or tilled in to build and benefit the soil. This doesn’t offend me and I don’t consider it being wasteful. I think of it as feeding the source that’s feeding me. With our mild winters there are a lot of cool weather crops that we grow so there is something green growing in the garden year round.

So what was accomplished in the garden today after I tidied up an herb garden and trimmed shrubs for a lady in town?

I planted eight rows of corn - if it makes reasonably well there will be around 400 ears – eight hills of cantaloupes, two rows of squash, and six hills of watermelons. I may have to cover some things once they are up and growing to protect them from a frost but the little bit of extra fussing with the stuff means an earlier harvest. That’s good for the table and it beats a lot of the bugs and stuff that thrive in this sub-tropical zone. Some things have to wait though. Nights are still pretty cool for vegetables that love it hot. Some of these are growing in our greenhouse waiting for the world to warm up to their liking. Others will be direct seeded beginning the first week in April.

What about the four dollar a loaf bread that includes ingredients that you can’t pronounce? It doesn’t sit well on our stomachs. A few dollars buys a lot of organic grain. We use our grain mill to make our own multi-grain flour and bake our own breads. It makes some mean blueberry muffins and pancakes too. We don’t have any problem pronouncing all the ingredients in our home baked breads.

Time, space, interest, and motivation make a pretty good foursome. Working together they will have us in the yard tearing up grass and putting in garden beds.

#3 Garden - First Year

2008-03-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

I can't help it. When I look at all the large patches of grass that people maintain as well manicured lawns I can't help but to think about all that wasted space that can be easily converted into something a lot more usable and productive. Why spend time and money mowing it when it can be turned into something that serves to nurture and sustain life instead of something that consumes time and energy and puts nothing on the table?

Last year (2007) was the first year for this plot. This picture was taken in April of '07. I started tilling it during the winter of '06 and it took quite a few passes to get it to the point that the loosened earth was deep enough for me to consider planting it. It was initially covered with the same sod that you see surrounding it. The deeply rooted sod itself is a bear to till through and the earth is packed and hard. At this point I was happy to have 5 - 6 inches of loosened earth to work with. That's a far cry from anything considered a deep bed but it was sufficient for getting started.

What we are beginning with here is also a far cry from anything that resembles healthy soil. It is little more than a basic growing medium that needs a lot of work. The thick sod had been sucking the life out of the earth for over 30 years and it takes some time and work to turn that sort of depletion around. It's important for people to realize the conversion process that's involved in beginning a garden in an area where soil nutrients have been pitifully depleted.

Though the assorted squash and corn in this photo grew off fairly well its production was rather lean. I was happy with it considering what we were initially working with. This year #3 should do a lot better. Over the winter I tilled in a large amount of organic material and now have a growing depth of 6 - 7 inches, an improvement over what we started with but still with room for improvement. What began as an earthen growing medium is beginning to resemble a more healthy soil. Growing healthy soil is one of the basic keys to growing healthy plants that produce nutritious fruit.

One of our goals is to grow, can, and freeze virtually all of the produce that we eat. At this point, three years into this endeavor, we aren't far from realizing this goal and there is a definite sense of satisfaction that comes as part of the multi-faceted process. We are fortunate to have the amount of space that we do, something that not everyone has at their disposal. A garden, however, doesn't have to be large to be productive. One 4' x 20' bed will produce a generous amount of food if it is well managed and cared for. A few 5 gallon buckets will grow a lot of tomatoes and peppers. Any deck or patio that gets a generous amount of sunlight can easily become a rewarding container garden.

David

To Till Or Not To Till

2008-03-06T05:10:00.000-08:00

That, for me, is not a difficult question to answer. There are several reasons that tilling the earth is important to me. Perhaps the single, simplest answer that sums them all up into one is that it keeps me connected to the enviroment, to my environment. Remaining mentally and emotionally connected to the soil of the earth cultivates the soil of the soul. So I take tilling the earth seriously and personally.

That's not supposed to sound New-Age. It has nothing to do with New Age philosophy or religion. It has to do with walking in the state of awareness that I am a steward of the earth. This connects me with and involves me in the original mandate to care for creation as a good custodian. The rewards are multi-leveled.

The first reward is a deep interior reward. This is something difficult to explain to people who've never personally involved themselves in living close to the earth. Above this ground level the eventual reward of the harvest doesn't come without a lot of tender loving care (that sounds better than sweat and blood) and involves an investment in learning. There are a lot of variables that affect growing the food crops that we eat. Insects, plant diseases, weather, taking the time to tend to things like weeds that seem to grow well despite all our best effort to eradicate them. That's all part of the process though, part of the growing experience.

There are a number of terms used to describe what we are doing agriculturally here at Homestead Hermitage and Gardens and all of them are good applicable terms. The one term that I prefer though was coined by Catherine Doherty -apostolic farming. This is also the title of a little, very readable book that she wrote and I recommend it to both veteran and want-to-be gardeners.

We are, in a micro-sense of the term, engaged in a micro-farming project. Since our geographical boundaries comprise only 3/4 of an acre I have a difficult time calling it a farm so I've borrowed Doherty's term, pruned it back a bit, and refer to what we are doing as apostolic gardening.

We now have something like 3500 sq. ft. in cultivation. I think that figures to about 1/12th of an acre in three separate garden beds. A lot of the landscaping that we are doing is in the edible form - pears, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and citrus. When we signed the papers on the place it came with three mature pecan trees that produce pretty good nuts. In the sub-tropical environment of SW Alabama we have food crops growing year round with adequate space to do proper crop rotation.

When I first started hand digging our first 4' x 20' bed a neighbor came over to see what I was doing. It was a terribly hot August afternoon. The ground was baked hard. I was soaked with sweat and beat down by the heat and stifling humidity. After a brief exchange of dialogue he commented, "Gardening is a nice hobby. I had a garden once." I wanted to hit him with my shovel and put him out of his misery.

Gardening can be a hobby. For me though it is a way of life, a way of life that is seemingly lost to most people who choose to plod rather than plow the sod of the earth.

David

Welcome To Homestead Hermitage and Gardens

2008-03-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

I'll be 54 in a few days, March 20th to be exact. It seems like it was only yesterday that I was a barefoot kid in a straw hat walking the winding corn rows that grew on this once terraced hillside of the little family farm that I grew up on.

Times change. People age. Children grow up and leave the roost thinking they are improving their lives. Maybe some do. But I can't help thinking that most of us who think we do really don't. We just become enslaved consumers with wallets full of plastic and an incurable dependency upon the systems that provide us with the fast commodities and readymade goods that keep us from realizing a personal connection to creation and its Creator.

I tried to forget and outlive the days when I was a kid walking barefoot in the freshly stirred soil. We were, after all, poor southern rednecks scratching out a living and raising practically everything we ate. It took a lot of years for me to begin to appreciate my small farm roots and to realize that I could run hard and far but never outrun something that was planted deeply in my soul, something that revolves around and evolves from a life of simple faith and a lifestyle of simplicity and sustainability.

In a number of ways a prodigal son has come home. Coming home has a certain sense of sadness about it. It also has a certain sense of accomplishment and purpose about it. It has a certain Providential center to it that is easier to experience than it is to define and explain.

Faith and simplicity are always better caught than taught. There are, none the less, some things that need to be said, some directives and explanations that need to be given, some realities that should serve as catylists for life change. When it comes to life and faith the rude truth of the matter is that it's always easier to preach a good line than it is to live one. It's easier to condemn all that is wrong in the world, and live as though all is right, than it is to honestly try to live in a way that realistically sets us apart from a world that is set on attempting to satisfy it's every whim and fancy at any cost.

So here we go. We've staked a little claim here and dubbed it Homestead Hermitage and Gardens. It's not a fictitious internet entity. It's 3/4 of an acre of real southern soil with close to 3500 square feet of vegetable gardens, fruit trees, flower beds, bird houses, and bird feeders. We are three years into development and though we have only just begun we want to share it with friends near and far and with whomsoever might be interested.

This blog will focus on the physical hermitage. In another blog http://www.oblateofferings.blogspot.com/ I will post things that are more devotionally centered, particularly as they relate to living as an Oblate of St. Benedict. Although they are inter-related I think it wise to try to keep the two fields (pun intended) separate. In either case, it is our hope that you will discover something that you find interesting and beneficial.

From Homestead Hermitage and Gardens

David