Root where you’re planted

Despite my joy at discovering the Jardin Punk ethic, I’ve spent the last two weeks slowly making my way down the two long beds on either border of my raised bed vegetable garden, forking up and pulling out the Bermuda grass roots. This morning, I was twirling the garden fork to wind them up the same way you wind spaghetti on a fork at dinner. There’s nothing to be done about Bermuda grass except to dig it every couple of years. It propagates by airborne seed, and any tiny chunk of root left behind. It truly is the green fuse that drives the flower. And no matter how I admire the jardin punk ethic, I would also like to grow some things in my vegetable garden this year, and so, out comes the Bermuda grass, fork by fork, six inches by six inches at a time. 

This also meant I wound up digging up my asparagus crowns and moving them. I was going to try to dig around them, but the Bermuda grass was so bad that it had, in several cases, pierced the asparagus roots, like sewing thread through a needle. 

Sigh. 

I finished clearing up, and realized I had a bag of chopped straw in the shed that I bought months ago for the chicken coop, but didn’t use, and so I shook it out over my newly-dug beds, hoping to smother out at least the worst of the reinfestation. There’s also an awful lot of self-seeded fennel and borage and calendula in these beds, so we’ll see what comes up. I wound up buying a couple more bags at the feed store and using it on the other beds. It’s cheap, covers a lot of space, looks nice, will biodegrade, and has been cleared of both wild seeds and wheat/barley seeds. Since I just pulled all that grass, the last thing I wanted to do was have to start pulling wheat up.

This garden has been very Jardin Punk the past few years — an overgrown wonderland of calendula, borage, nasturtium, fennel with a few kales and herbs who were hardy enough to break through the overgrowth. One of the precursors to, and inspirations for Eric Lenoir’s punkification of the garden is Masanobu Fukuoka, whose One Straw Revolution is both a call to a more nature-driven approach to gardening, and a powerful manifesto of the power of gardens and nature in the wake of war. I read it years ago, and inspired by Fukoaka, I’ve long since given up on planting in rows. Fukuoka is a huge proponent of scatter sowing, of intercropping and allowing natural food crops to succeed one another the way plants do in the wild. I tend to save up leftover seeds in old jars by type: cosmos, lettuces, marigolds, kales, calendulas, chickories, other brassicas, and to scatter sow them. Sometimes they germinate, sometimes they don’t, but mostly you wind up with beds thick with plants, plants you can harvest at different stages of their development, and others that will flower and self-seed eventually.

I’ll probably do a little less of this approach this year, because it feels like time to be more intentional about growing food out here in this backyard vegetable garden I built, then rebuilt, then rebuilt again. Now that I’m not working full time anymore, now that I can look forward to going out into the garden in the mornings, watering and checking on it and paying attention, now that I’ve started nearly 2 dozen tomato and pepper plants, well, it felt like time for a clean slate. And so, two weeks of digging, and more weeks of starting seeds in flats.

Soon these beds will be full of greens, and flowers, and some tomatoes in the sunnier bed near the house, and if I can get them past the slugs and the flea beetles there will be beans, those wide flat Roma beans I love that you can’t find in any of the stores. The high beds in the center of the garden, the ones that are two feet high, they’ll get turned when the spring greens are done, when the bush tomatoes are going in, when the peppers go in their bed. When I built them several years ago, I didn’t have the money to buy enough bagged dirt to fill them, and it seemed extravagant to do so, so I put about half a bale of straw in the bottom of each bed for bulk, then added compost, and I’ve been folding straw litter/compost from the chicken coop in every year. They’re not full to the top, but that’s kind of worked as a benefit, the wooden sides provide a warm microclimate, and some protection from our winds. 

The earth has circled the sun once again, and the days are getting longer, and although we have three or four inches of melting snow out there at the moment, pulling the garden together feels like one very small stand against the assault we’re all facing, the assault against not only the mechanisms of our democracy, but against the very idea of any collective action at all.

Why a garden at all?

When we were little, there was a family in the farm town where my grandmother lived who had a big vegetable garden. I remember being taken over for a visit one hot August afternoon, and walking through her tomato plants, and being given a tomato to eat right there, like an apple. It was so juicy you had to lean forward so you didn’t wind up with a shirt full of tomato. It was one of the most delicious things I’d ever tasted. Warm and tart and tomato.

It might have been that same visit when I asked my grandmother, as we drove over to the next town to the grocery store and the only tomatoes they had, that any of the stores had in the late 60s, were small, and came 3 to a little carton, sealed in cellophane and shipped from California. They didn’t taste like anything really. I remember asking my grandmother why we didn’t grow things you could eat on our farm. We grew feed corn, and soybeans, and hay, but we didn’t have a garden like Mrs. Gustafson did.

“Because it’s cheaper to buy it at the store,” she said.

When people wax poetic about their grandmothers’ cooking, well, mine was not that kind of grandmother. She rode horses and drove snowmobiles. Fast. She taught us all how to shoot BB guns when we were WAY to small to be handling any kind of weapon. She stayed up all night watching TV and reading murder mysteries, and while she liked us to entertain ourselves, she also found us cool things to play with, like the big box of wooden slats, the kind that go on pants hangers, that she’d bought somewhere and which she gave us to use as building toys. In combination with the Hot Wheels orange racecar tracks, we built some amazing Rube Goldberg setups.

There had been a garden, and a milk cow, and a couple of beef steers and a pig, and a flock of chickens on the farm through WW2 and, I think, into those lean years in the 50s when my grandfather was not working and her parents, who had supported them for years, were getting older and dying. She’d put up meat in the town meat locker for winter, and when they went out to the farm on weekends (she was the majordomo of a private school in Chicago), she’d bring meat back to the city for the week. During the war, she made all 4 of her kids memorize how to get from Lincoln Park to Leland by foot. “If there’s an invasion” she told them. “Get to the farm, and Omie can feed you.” (Omie was the hired man.)

A tiny bit dramatic, but the idea that if you have a piece of ground, if you have somewhere to go in an emergency, somewhere you can grow food, then you’ll be safe — this idea is one of my most fundamental beliefs.

A piece of ground

This isn’t the first time I’ve kind of let my garden go feral, and have had to reclaim it, and every time I think of Bruno Latour, in his book Down to Earth, where he says that: “There is nothing more innovative, nothing more present, nothing less rustic and rural, nothing more creative, nothing more contemporary than to negotiate landing on some ground.”

I moved here all those years ago not just because Livingston was cheap then, and not just because there were writers and artists here. I moved here because I wanted a place. I wanted some ground on which to land. Latour, who was part of the French wine family, knew all too well how the Local can curdle into the xenophobic nationalisms we’re seeing here in the US, in France, and gaining power across the world. His way out of this problem was by defining “the Terrestrial” as an oppositional force to “the Local”. Where the Local seeks to attach to a piece of ground as a means to exclude the rest of the world, the Terrestrial is a means of: ‘attaching oneself to the soil on the one hand and becoming attached to the world on the other’. It’s a way of grounding oneself while not building a barricade. It’s a way to think about resilience in a time of climate catastrophe and political turmoil that doesn’t involve filling your basement with weapons to protect your barrels of freeze-dried food from invaders, but that relies instead on the idea that my garden is attached to the allotment garden at the old Lincoln school at one end of the alley as well as to the Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen at the other end of the block, a community resource who provide hot dinners and company for anyone who needs it, every day of the week. Thinking in terms of the Terrestrial means offering my excess tomato starts to the neighbor.

It’s no secret that I’ve spent much of the past few years looking at little houses in France, researching visa requirments, dreaming of finding a piece of ground in a country that still practices (imperfectly bien sur) the values of liberté, égalité, fraternité. If the market hadn’t crashed like it has, I’d probably be going over this summer to look at a couple of houses in particular, trying to get a toehold in case we need to get out of here. But that avenue seems to have closed, at least for now, and so, it’s time to turn back to my piece of ground, time to put my energy back into the place where I am rooted, where I have a deep partnership with my dude, where I have community.

Clearing out my garden, pulling the Bermuda grass, pruning back the lilacs, buying new seed-starting supplies and a little greenhouse, getting set to grow food and flowers and chickens again, all this is how I root myself once more in this ground in which I’m planted. Root myself so that with any luck, I can live a decent retirement, can write some books, can be a good partner, and can contribute to my community.

Values that should not be radical at all. Values that with any luck at all, people are being reminded are the core of our national identity. Not being rich. Not being “strong.” But being connected to one another, to our communities, to the earth, through bonds of care.