"Farming" . . . Just Because I Can!

I am not a farmer, nor the son of a farmer.

My father, who grew up in rural Northern Oklahoma, wanted nothing to do with the natural world as an adult. As I child, I had to beg him to go fishing. And as an adolescent, when I wanted to grow tomatoes and watermelon in the backyard of our home in the heart of the city, it was my mother who helped me, not my dad.

My thumb tends more toward brown than green. I never was very good at the gardening . . . either too much water, or not enough. I've unintentionally killed more plant-life in my days than I have aided growth. I learned about my deficiencies firsthand in that adolescent garden. Further, the basketball, which I truly loved, kept bouncing into the plants when I would miss to the right, so the tomatoes had a rough go of it. In any given year that I planted a garden in that corner of the backyard, it only yielded a few tomatoes. But it was something I wanted to be a part of, something that was important to me.

The dream lives on, though, so this year with some space to garden -- I'm calling it "farming", just because I can!! -- our son Bradley and his family (Rissa, Ainsleigh, and Sullivan) have helped Paula and me prepare beds and put in vegetables of many varieties. We are calling ourselves the NW Arkansas Wendell Berry Garden Club -- again, just because I can! -- after the noted Kentucky farmer/poet/environmentalist/activist. It's not that I fashion myself as Wendell Berry, but I do take him as my role model.

I'm concerned, now that I'm late into the autumn of my own life, that my gardening skills have gotten no better, that I will do something to sabotage the seed and seedlings, causing them not to grow, not to produce fruit. I'm really a novice at this with no real experience, but I've enlisted good help -- Bradley and Rissa have cultivated gardens and produced an abundance of fruit for many years, so they bring the know-how while I provide the grunt labor. And the labor, thrusting my hands into the soil, mixing the compost and the peat . . . this is what I love, and what I have been disconnected from for decades.

I recognize that soil and water and sunshine and nutrients and humans, all bring their own energy to this endeavor. The success of the "farm" depends on the energy we each bring to the process. There is so much I, as the human energy, cannot control; however, there are some thing I CAN control. So I'll do what I can, the best I can, hoping that in two months there will be fruit to show for the effort . . . when all the various elements come together in an onion, in a potato, in a salad.


"The Man Born to Farming"
by Wendell Berry

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?