Deep Gleaning

Every other morning lately, I'm out in the front yard, harvesting okra.  

I've grown far more of it than I need, with just about twenty plants chugging away.  Ten of those are packed over-dense into a four by eight bed, so their production has been less per plant.  This is only my second season growing, so I'm still figuring the whole thing out.  The tallest of them now stand well over five feet, and lately I get about a quart a day from the lot of 'em.  

I don't need anywhere near that much, and there's only so much bhindi masala, gumbo, and batter-fried okra folks in my household want to eat.  I've already selected the healthiest plants to let run to seed stock for next year, so the question becomes: what to do with the rest?

Giving those pods to neighbors?  That's a bit of a stretch in the suburban Mid-Atlantic, where okra mostly has a reputation for slime.  This is, of course, utterly unfair.  Okra's delicious when prepared properly, nutty and nutritious, with a satisfyingly toothsome texture.  But still, folks seem confused and unfairly repulsed by it.

In most of the rest of the world, that's not the case.  In the traditionally warmer regions of the planet, where most of humankind dwells, it's a staple crop.  Easy to grow and productive, it's highly desired, even in its spinier forms.

Out in front of my little church, there's that Little Free Pantry, one that we started to supplement the traditional food bank in town.  Folks get hungry in the off-hours, after all.  It's taken off in ways we didn't anticipate.  In the last six months, with the support of the church and our friends in the community, twenty seven thousand pounds of food have been funneled through a cheery little bird-feederesque box.  We've set out coolers, too, and...notably...built a Little Free Produce Stand.

Because Poolesville Presbyterian sits in the heart of an agricultural reserve, there are plenty of folks who garden, and from their efforts produce an overabundance.  There are, similarly, many who have more resources than they actually need for their well-being.  When gardens produce more than we need, it shouldn't ever go to waste.

When there's an overabundance, the great sacred narrative of the Bible is real clear about how we are to use it.  More than you need?  Torah sez: don't squeeze every last drop out of the land.  We are called instead to be sure to set a portion of our efforts aside for those who have need.  From Leviticus 19, we hear:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.  

From Deuteronomy 24, we hear:  

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.

And as the Law was woven by storytellers into narrative form, that becomes part of the defining mythopoetics of a culture.  The Book of Ruth recounts how Ruth the Moabite and her mother Naomi...a foreigner and a widow, respectively...gleaned from the fields of the honorable Boaz.  And Ruth and Boaz getting to know one another better was, as the story goes, how the lineage of King David.  Without the ethic of leaving something for those who have need, there is no Israel.  There is no messianic understanding.  It's kinda sorta important.

And in our grasping, Mammonist age, we've forgotten this.  We're encouraged to anxiously optimize, until everything we have is turned inwards, our energies like those of a collapsing star, hoarding light as it folds upon itself.

If my efforts serve me alone, if I maximize my profit at every turn and seek my own advantage without exception, then I have become an affront to the justice of God's covenant.  That's a sustained and basic moral imperative, if you understand the Bible as an authoritative text in your life.

That said, there's not a whit to stop you from doing more.  Gleaning can go deeper.  If you expand your plantings, you can do so with the explicit intent of feeding those who hunger.

And so I knew, when I planted all that okra, that I'd have my fill, and that come harvest time, I'd be bringing bag after bag of tasty nutritious pods to the produce stand.

They're gone within the half-hour, picked up by women driving cleaning service vehicles, or men driving pickups filled with lawn equipment.

And every morning, when I snip those pods, I recall that if I expect any blessing upon the work of my hands, I need to be that blessing.

Itch and Thistle

It was in the early spring of last year, reaching down to pluck a green bean, that I first got stabbed.  

It was an unexpectedly sharp pain in the pad of my thumb, not overwhelming, but decidedly unpleasant, like experiencing the ministrations of a nervous trainee phlebotomist.

I recoiled.  Had I been stung?  There was no swelling, no redness.  I popped out my reading glasses and peered at my thumb.  There was no evidence of a thorn, or a stinger.  The jab hadn't even drawn blood.

I carefully investigated.  Down in the dense foliage of the bed, amidst the fat and growing beans, I found the culprit.  A thistle, girded round about with needle-sharp thorns.  Next to it another, and another.  Further recon revealed that they were suddenly everywhere, and that they'd spread to most of my raised beds.

I'd not seen them in my garden before, but it didn't take long to realize where they'd come from.  We'd had a birdfeeder in our front yard, one we stocked and restocked with seed.  Among those seeds: thistle.  It had gone forth and multiplied.

Thistle is, viewed through a certain lens, a very desirable plant.  It feeds pollinators, which is a good thing.  With a whole bunch of effort and some heavy gloves, it can be eaten, particularly the roots.  Most importantly, it is Indigenous, or at least Field Thistle is, and as we all know, Indigeneity is axiomatically magical and virtuous.

But believing all those things won't keep it from stabbing you.  It has evolved to stab you, and any naive romantic notions of traipsing barefoot through grass where thistle is starting to establish itself will end in pain.  

Poison Ivy is a vigorous Indigene too, as a recent trip to Urgent Care with my swollen-faced 86 year old mother reminded me.  Toxicodendron Radicans also grows vigorously, feeds pollinators and birds, and slathers itself in urushiol, an oily compound that causes rashes, blistering, and anaphylaxis.  Were it a human, it would be the sort of human who violated international treaties on chemical warfare.

The thistle is back this year, and I don't hesitate when I encounter it. Wherever I see thistle or poison ivy, I destroy them.  I root up the thistle with heavy gloves and pointy metal implements.  I poison the poison ivy.  I give no quarter, and I hunt them down proactively. 

There are always souls who'd find reasons these plants and other creatures of similar stabby toxicity should be tolerated.  They're just being what they are, one might say.  They're part of Nature in all Her Beauty!  Live and let live!  Let everything grow!  Let a thousand poisonous, needle-sharp flowers bloom!  

This seems peculiarly abstracted from the reality of life.

I am not such a soul, nor do I feel that's my purpose in this beautiful, dangerous world.  I am as alive as they are alive, and our striving against one another is simply part of the order of God's creation.  

I appreciate my opponents, their vitality, their energy, the honed foil of their thorns.  But that doesn't stop me from rooting both itch and thistle from the garden of my tending.

Beans and Berries and Sweat on the Brow

This morning, as the sun crested the small rise to the East, I was out in my garden picking the last of the blueberries. 

 The day was going to be fiercely hot, stinky sticky smothering hot, with humidity in the eighties and real temperatures potentially cresting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  It's the sort of day when spending time outside is best done early, the sort of day when the heat doesn't dissipate with the setting of the sun. 

The last of the succulent deep-purple berries hung fat on my bushes, though, and my greenbeans were poppin', so there was harvesting to be done.  After walking the dog, drinking my coffee, and attending briefly to the daily mess of world news, I took a couple of shiny metal bowls out into the yard and started picking.

I'd already pulled a gallon and a half worth of berries off of our two bushes, and so there wasn't much left worth plucking.  Just about a cup of ripe fruit remained, the berries perfect and ready, popping off their stems with only the very lightest of effort.  The dull faint tink of each falling fruit against the bottom of the stainless steel bowl was pleasing to the ear, chiming to mark the sultry end of my blueberry season.  

Then it was on to my four by eight bean patch, where I squatted and plucked again, pinching beans from stems with thumb and forefinger.  My trusty old bush beans, seedsaved for nearly a decade, were starting to produce.  

As I picked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat prickled across my forehead beneath the shade of my hat-brim.  I felt the effort in my middle-aged thighs as I squatted, moving counterclockwise around the raised bed.  I peered into the dense interwoven foliage, gently parting it with my hand, eyes moving from bean to bean, my mind sorting between those that are ready and those worth leaving for another harvest later in the week.  About a half-gallon of beans today, filling my larger bowl.

It's simple work, physical and wholly engaging.  For forty five minutes or an hour before the heat of the day becomes too much, it's no great burden.  But for a whole day?  For eight hours, even with breaks?  It would be utterly exhausting, and the endurance required to work in the fields seems...to my flaccid suburban flesh...herculean.

Gardening, I reflected as I popped plump beans into my bowl, is a good reminder of what it takes to bring food to our tables.  It's the most fundamentally necessary labor, but also the labor that we've chosen to ignore as a society.  It's viewed as unworthy of our effort, as the most menial and lowly of tasks, to be performed by those at the very bottom of the economic food chain.   It is the work of migrants and the imprisoned, not that there seems much difference between those two categories in America these days.

That such labor is disrespected is an abomination.  That it is a thousand times less lucrative than dooping around with some AI-enhanced blockchain folderol seems a perversion of the order of things.  It's an inhuman and unnatural misvaluation.  As a substantial portion of our culture turns snarling against those whose sweat and strain feeds it, this seems a form of madness.  Is it seething resentment at our dependence, that we rely utterly upon the work of others, and that our "superiority" is nothing but a mask for our weakness?  Perhaps. 

Or perhaps we're just fools.

Perhaps we are as brimming with hubris as the Spartans, who imagined that their monomaniacal worship of Ares made them stronger than their slaves.  For without the humble helots who grew the crops and tended the livestock, all the martial disciplines of Leonidas wouldn't have kept him alive for a week.  Or are we like Midas, perhaps?  Are we about to break our teeth on grapes gone hard to our touch, feeling our thirst rise as we peer down at the unquenching metal of our Mammonists desire that now fills our glass?

A little less time in the false halls of golden delusion might clear our addled minds, and return us to right appreciation of the things that matter.  

A little more time in our gardens, with the fruit of the earth before us and sweet honest sweat on our brow. 

 

Difficult Weeding

As my garden stirs to life in the burgeoning warmth of early summer, I find myself engaged in some difficult weeding.

Weeding is something I enjoy.  It's primal and satisfying, as I carefully root out plants that are encroaching on the growth I'm trying to encourage.  Grasses and chickweed, clover and creeping violets?  They're all welcome to the rest of my yard, which is a flower-speckled natural smorgasbord for pollinators.  But in the 272 square feet I've got set aside as raised beds, I've got other plans.

So I take the time to root about and remove all of the growth that doesn't match my intent for that space.  It's a constant effort, but well worth it for the health of my vegetables.

Where it gets peculiar?  Volunteers.  

As most of my soil now comes from the compost piles in my shaded back yard, the last few years I've noted an ever-growing number of desirable plants rising from my compost-amended beds.  The seeds that make their way into the compost bin have a tendency to want to grow.

The familiar forms of squash seedlings rise in the middle of a bed I've got set aside for okra.  The usually welcome leaves of young tomatoes spring up where butternuts and 'lopes are intended.  This year, I counted over thirty 'maters popping up their distinctively complex first leafings.  Thirty.  That's a whole lot of unanticipated offering.

In some places, I'll leave them.  Several of the Providential tomatoes are welcome to stay in my tomato plots.  Last year, when a cantaloupe unexpectedly presented itself, I just let it run, and man, it was delicious.  I look forward to planting the progeny of those 'lopes this year.  

But in most of my garden, they're just not part of the plan.

Here, my pastoral predilections come into conflict with my gardening awareness.  As a small church pastor, unexpected volunteer energies are as welcome as manna from heaven.  Where human beings of their own free will make the choice to serve and put in effort, it's a marker of something afoot that needs to be encouraged and enthusiastically supported.  Those blessings are a vital part of God's work in the world, and the primary pastoral task is to nurture, resource, and celebrate them.  

Sometimes, a gentle nudge of the pastoral crook is necessary to keep things on track, to assuage the mutual misunderstandings that we humans are so good at, or to keep limited energies from scattering.  But mostly, it's a question of not letting my ALL-SHALL-LOVE-ME-AND-DESPAIR ego-desire to be in control become a stumbling block to what the Holy Spirit is doing.  

It's remarkable how much of pastoring is simply not getting in the way. 

But an actual garden?  It needs a bit more focusing than the metaphorical garden of the faithful.  It only takes the form and shape we give it, as herbs and vegetables aren't capable of sharing our intent for their growth or placement, no matter how many planning meetings and visioning exercises we inflict on them.

Weeding must be done.

So, with muttered words of apology and promises to tend well to their kin, I'll dig fingers into the ground, and pluck tiny tomatoes and seedling squash from the living soil.  

With Hands in the Soil

Out in my front yard, my garden is stirring after an erratic but wintery winter.

In the two eight by eight beds that flank my driveway, the green shoots of garlic that overwintered are getting perky again.  The asparagus has started to offer up its first tentative shoots, which means I've got about a month of early spring harvest ahead of me.

The budding seed potatoes that were starting to get out of hand in the darkness of a cupboard have found their way into half-barrels filled with compost and leaves.  Those taters were getting desperate, flailing out long dead-white tendrils that made their section of the cupboard look like something out of a John Carpenter film.

I've been clearing out all nine of my raised beds, pulling old weeds and removing excess leaf-fall.  With the beds prepped, I've brought wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of compost from my slightly disappointing compost yield for this year.  Even though that new earth isn't quite ready, it's still got plenty of wriggly waking worms mixed in, who'll help continue to break down the soil now that it's been mingled with the earth of the beds.

All of it means that I've got my hands in the dirt now, and it's a good feeling.  It is, rather literally, grounding.

I was down on my muddied knees weeding one of my four by four beds on a warm afternoon when a neighbor walked by.  This happens regularly, and it's a way for overly-introverted-me to be stirred to conversation with the souls who live nearby.  I'll hear their own stories of planting and soil, or tell them about something I'm excited to be growing.  It's part of what makes gardening such a pleasurable thing.

This neighbor was, as it happened, one who had recently yelled at me as I walked my dog past his property.  Twice.

Ah, thought I.  It's That Guy.

As he strode up the sidewalk, eyes forward, I suppose I could have ignored him.  Just kept my head down, busily paying attention to anything but the human being who was crossing in front of my property.

But the day was bright and lovely, and spring was in the air, and my hands were in the warm earth.  Gardening has me in the habit of offering gracious words to passers-by, and I was in no mood to be anything other than neighborly.  

"It's a beautiful day to be out in the world," I piped up, trowel in hand.

He looked over, a little startled.  "It really is a great day," he replied.  Not a hint of animosity in his voice, not even a whisper of the snarl that had last soured it.  He offered up a gentle smile of genuine pleasure at a shared and glorious afternoon.

"Enjoy your walk," I said.

"I will," he said, and continued on up the street.

It's good to get your hands in the earth.  It really is.

The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

I will, on occasion, see folks pitching up suburban survival gardens.  We suburbanites are anxious creatures, dimly aware of how vulnerable we are if everything were to suddenly go south.  In response to this anxiety, I'll occasionally see some bright-eyed influencer who's packed their quarter-acre full of raised beds.  I'm hashtag self-sufficient, they'll hashtag say!  Hashtag blessed!

I'm under no such illusions, and am quite aware of how far I am from being able to provide for my needs from my property.  Self sufficient I ain't.

Well, I am in a few things.  My garden plots yield 100% of the garlic that I require on an annual basis.  29 heads of garlic came out of the ground this last May, and I expect they'll carry me comfortably through to May of 2025.

I also produce 100% of the basil we use for cooking, as I've got a four by four bed dedicated that sweet, delightful herb.  It fills the area near the carport with a delightful fragrance during summer and fall, and produces enough basil that this year I finally got around to drying and saving it.  Sixteen cups of basil dried down to fill a medium-sized spice jar, which is more than enough to overwinter.

I'm angling towards providing all of my own rosemary, having put in two plants this year.  I've got mint out the wazoo, because mint being mint, the issue isn't cultivating it, but keeping it from taking over the entire garden.

So I'm getting close to being herb-self-sufficient.  

But that's pretty much it.  My suburban quarter acre simply can't provide enough to sustain a one hundred and seventy five pound omnivore, let alone two of us.  

I mean, I could pretend it did, if I turned and cultivated every inch of arable soil in my light-filled front yard.  With fencing and several greenhouse enclosures, I could stave off the chipmunks and squirrels and deer that take a substantial portion of my yield.  That would increase production by a factor of ten.  

Which sound great, but as I only produce about 1% of my total caloric intake from my own garden plots, that'd still leave 80% remaining.

I could, I suppose, cut down every single tree in my back yard, converting that area into an urban farm.   But...where would I get the leaves for my compost pile?   Driving to Home Depot to pick up plastic bags full of soil kinda stretches the meaning of "self-sufficiency."  And where would the water come from?  I don't have a well, nor could a well be relied upon in a long dry season, particularly if my densely packed neighbors ever drank or washed or flushed their toilets.  

Rural folk may think they have it better, but the reality is a little different.  Yeah, you've got more land.  But how do you till that soil?  How do you plant and grow?  Americans agriculture is now completely machine-reliant, and those machines themselves rely on a vast and convoluted industrial network to provide the fuel that runs them.  How often do you need to refuel a combine?  How often do you refuel your truck?  That's the extent of your self-reliance right there.  Without those refineries and tanker trucks, that John Deere is just a lump of expensive metal.

The reality, for most American human beings, is that we're not even close to being able to meet our own physical needs if something...or someone...sabotaged the systems that sustain our existences.

Always a fun thought.

Of Trauma and New Growth

I've been growing okra this year, mostly as an experiment to see how it fares in our ever warming Midatlantic climate.  

The answer, much to my surprise, was that it did fine, but underproduced at the height of our record-setting summer.  It's heat tolerant, yes, but once temperatures got up into the high nineties (that's mid-thirties for the rest of the world) growth and production slowed down.  That was compounded by a moderate drought, which stunted growth even more despite my best efforts at watering.  Nothing beats a good soaking rain, and that just wasn't forthcoming for much of the summer.

Yields were less than I expected, but still enough.  The usual territorial incursions of squirrels and chipmunks and wandering deer weren't present, which is often the case when you introduce a new and unfamiliar plant to the garden.  

I harvested and flash-froze dozens of pods for use in curries, where they have proved nutty and toothsome and utterly delicious.  Given that half of my family was from the South, I figured I'd also fry some up with cornmeal batter. 

The plants had great leaf growth, and as temperatures started to moderate a bit and the rains returned on a more regular basis, production ramped up.  Each okra blossomed with multiple flowers and growing pods, and it looked like I'd get that bumper crop I'd been hoping for...enough to start bringing some in to my churches' Little Free Produce Stand.

"Great," I thought to myself.  "This is working exactly according to plan."  Never think that.

Because that's right about when the deer hit.  

That's "deer," singular, or so my neighbor across the street told me.  Just one doe, unusually thin, that spent a good long while uprooting my early fall green bean plantings, and then dove voraciously into the okra.  The neighbor came over to shoo it away, but the deer seemed unphased.  It might, like a skeletal doe I encountered last year, have been suffering from wasting disease, which makes deer both listless, endlessly hungry, and utterly unafraid.

It was a massacre.  

Half of my plants had their flowers, all of their pods, and most of their leaves consumed.  That included my two most productive plants, which I'd hoped to use for seedsaving later in the season.  They were reduced to sad green twigs with short, mostly empty branches, only a few wan leaves hanging off here and there.  

I redoubled my application of anti-deer spray, which seemed to prevent another attack on the few okra that remained.

I turned my attention elsewhere in the garden.  I uprooted spent beans and tomatoes, amended the soil with homegrown compost, and got to replanting for the fall harvest.  

A few days later, I noticed that the ravaged okra was responding to trauma.  Not by withering, not by dying or surrendering to death, but by defiant regrowth.  

From the "elbows" between the main trunk and branches, the cells of the plant had repurposed themselves.  Fresh new leaves, delicate and hopeful, unfurling out of seemingly nothing, ready to catch the rays of the sun.  

From the abundant light of our G type main sequence star and a single minded vitality, the work of life would start again.

Gardens can be such heartening things.

Stalk and Vine

At the far northeastern corner of my little suburban lot, the sunflowers are again rising.  I've been growing them for several years now, and they're a delight.  This year, my little three by eight patch is thick with their rising stalks and greenery, and being the vigorous plants they are, they stand nearly at shoulder height already.  

The flowers are coming.

As plants, my helianthus are a gift to the garden for many reasons.  They're wildly attractive to pollinators, who then grace the flowers of my beans and tomatoes.  Situated right by the sidewalk, their beneficent compound flowers are a clear pleasure to passers by and magic for children.  

Their seeds feed passing birds in late summer, and the occasional odd vagrant.  Even after feeding the birds in an Optimally Poppins sort of way, their abundant seed heads provide ample stock for the next years planting.  That, and their dried stalks become my garden stakes for the next year.

For all of their robustness, sunflowers have a weakness.  They are, in this era of rising winds, vulnerable to the roaring blast of downbursts and squall lines.  In my first few seasons growing them, I'd lose many to storms, to the point where I started supporting them with stakes and lines.  That helped, but it was a little fiddly.

This year, though, I'm doing something different.

From an old dogwood stump, wild grapevines started growing.  Their tendrils snake through the stalks, and in the way of most vines, can threaten to overwhelm the sunflowers.  Left unchecked, the tangle of sprawling, smothering wild grape would easily overwhelm the whole stand of sunflowers.  It'd become a mass of fruitless grape, the leaves intercepting the light, the tendrils strangling the sunflower leaves.  The sunflowers would struggle.

I thought about systematically tearing the vine out last year, as I have with sweet, murderous honeysuckle in the past.

But then the thought came to me:  I could use it.  Useless as it seems, fruitless as it is, it could be helpful.  With regular and strategic trimming, the wild grape becomes something different.  The vines I let grow, and I let them secure themselves to the stalks.

Then, once a week or so, I cut it back, to be sure it's not dominating the sunflowers.

With the wild grape acting as organic support lines, the sunflowers are more resistant to high winds.  The complex matrix of tendrils fasten the stalks one to another, strengthening the whole, and all of them become stabilized by the root system of the grape.  

With a little effort, attention, and some judicious trimming, even wild grapes can serve a good purpose.

There's some comfort in that.

A Thicket of Spears

Three years ago, I put bare-root asparagus into a four by eight plot in my front yard.  

I've always enjoyed asparagus, and when my wife suggested one evening that she thought it'd be fun if we grew it, I needed little further encouragement.  While you can grow asparagus from seed, the best way to get it going is transplantable rootstock, and so that's what I ordered.  The little brown tangles arrived in the mail, looking...as bare root plants often do...like nothing more than yard detritus.  Into the ground they went, and the waiting began.

Lots of waiting.

Asparagus are sturdy, long-yielding perennial fernish critters, cousins of the lily, and a well-established plot can provide a few tasty weeks of early spring sweetness for decades.  But like so many good things, they require patience.  The roots need years to establish, and if you harvest the spears in the first couple of years, you'll cripple or kill the plants.

So I've been waiting, these last two years, gently weeding in spring and summer, cutting back the dead stems in fall.  In winter, I've tucked the roots under a blanket of leaf-mulch from my yard, and fed the soil with the wood-ash from my fireplace.  Those years have flew, as years are wont to do when one gets older.  This year, I sampled my first harvest.

When the first spears stabbed up through the mulch in early spring, I snapped them at their base, and munched on them right there in the garden.  They were, as all who advised me suggested, quite delicious.  

For three and a half weeks in early spring, we ate all of the produce of that modest little patch.  Every effort of those roots, devoured.  I could have pushed for a week more, but after returning from a short family trip to Texas, the spears had explosively regrown.  

After weeks of being cut back, every growth devoured, every effort stymied, the plants were stronger than I'd ever seen them.  Spears as thick as my thumb had shot up a foot in a matter of days, growth so vigorous and rapid that it felt like one could almost see it.  I'd been so concerned about weakening the plants in the years of their childhood and adolescence that I was surprised at their vitality.

Weeks of traumatizing and retraumatizing them had done nothing more than piss them off.  Their growth felt a little defiant, a little fierce, as living things so often can be when we face a challenge from a position of resilience. 

"Respect," I may have muttered to them, as I weeded around the phalanx of green.

It was time to back off, and let them grow.

Front Yard Gardening

It's been a good spring, because it's been spring this spring.

The last four or five years, late March and early April have been inordinately warm.  Temperatures in the high seventies, sometimes kissing eighty.  The soil has heated early, and in response I've gotten my garden going early.

This year, though, it has felt as it once regularly felt.  The air still has a wet chill about it most mornings.  The vaunted April showers have come, and the wild admixture of fescue and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and creeping Charlie that comprise my front "lawn" are fat with green growth.

And so the work of the garden has begun.  The asparagus are rising, sweet and tender and tasty, particularly snapped and eaten right there by their plot.  The overwintered garlic looks robust, although I'm a solid month from digging for the bulbs.  The beets were planted into a four by eight section in the week before Easter, and potatoes went into their half barrels.  The blueberries are beginning to flower, as is one of the two little apple trees I put in two years ago.  I spade-turned and reseeded the sidewalk-adjacent patch of sunflowers from seed I'd saved last year.

I've added another 64 square feet of raised bed space for this season, which brings me to just under three hundred square feet of bed space.  That's right at the edge of what I can manage without spending every waking moment in my yard...not that I'd mind that, particularly.  All of that takes place in my front yard, right out there with the sidewalk and the street.

We Americans tend towards backyard gardening, bustling away in compartmentalized isolation, but I prefer gardening out front, for two reasons.

First and most practically, it's where the sun is.  Our back yard is blessed with dozens of trees, which means light falls only sparsely on the small section of moss and grass between the patio and the woods.  It'd make for a terrible garden, because there's no point in trying to grow things if you don't give them light.  It's also low and prone to getting more than a little swampy, as it's where...absent the storm drains...a stream would naturally flow.  That treed area produces a lovely harvest of fallen leaves for the compost pile, and makes for a great location for said compost, but otherwise, its function is as a place to sit and relax while the dog romps about.

You grow in the light.

Second, it's more public.  More social.  It's friendlier.  As an introvert, this might seem like a peculiar thing to take pleasure in, but I do.  When I'm out planting or weeding or harvesting, I see my neighbors.  There they are, walking by, with their dogs or with tiny people in strollers.  I say hello.  Sometimes, they stop and chat for a bit, or ask about what's coming up this year.  Often, they'll share what they're growing, or talk about how they'd like to start a garden themselves.  I get to know faces and voices.

Yesterday, as I was harvesting asparagus, a little family I've talked with several times before meandered by on their regular early evening constitutional.  We chatted, and they asked what I was doing, and then I offered them newly sprouted spears from the wet earth.

"So sweet," he said.  "Really tender," said she.  It was a lovely little moment.

Growing out where it can be seen makes a difference.  It shifts and shapes our expectations of how we connect with both neighbor and creation.  We grow in the light, after all.

Dad's Garden

When my family returned to the States from London back in 1982, my father planted a garden.  

A five-by-ten patch of grass on the southeastern side of our back yard was dug up, soil amendments added, and every year in the late spring, he'd set tomato seedlings into the earth.  Better Boys, generally speaking, because they were the perfect complement to BLTs and burgers.

Dad was a single generation removed from actual farming-stock, as my paternal grandfather grew up on several hundred acres of family farm in upstate New York.  Hops were the primary yield of the family farm just outside of the little village of Chuckery Corners, but there we Williams grew everything, as most Americans once did.  

Connecting with the soil was a thing for Dad.  Not as important as music and performance, but still something that gave a sense of heritage.  It was part of his story.

Every summer from middle school onward, the tomatoes at home were fresh picked.  Rows were set out on our screened-in porch to sun-redden to ripeness, safe from the depredations of deer and squirrels and the occasional enterprising turtle.

As the years progressed, the tomatoes kept coming.  Eventually, gardening got harder.  Dad's knees started to go.  Then his hip.  Then, bit by bit, his heart.  By the time he was in congestive heart failure, the garden was too much for him.  My brother and I pitched in to help keep it going, and as the CHF progressed, we managed to keep a few tomatoes coming.  Dad took pleasure knowing they were there, as my brother tended the plants during the summers he spent caring for my folks.

When Dad died early last fall after a hard season, the garden sat fallow. With spring coming on, Mom asked that I pull the fence I'd put in a few years back, and take up the pavers that once sat between rows of plants.

So this last week, I did.  The fence, gone.  The paving stones, dug from earth. 

What had been a garden is now returned to grass.

The pavers, I took for my own gardens. 

They took their place in my eight by eight raised beds, where they will provide stepping stones between tomatoes and garlic and greenbeans, between the garden that is present and the garden that has passed.

A Canopy of Grace

As the Poolesville Community Garden winds down its first year of operation, it's been great seeing the church and our partnership with Poolesville Green, the town, and local businesses thrive.    It's exciting, and a blessing, because gardens are a wonderful, amazing way to be fed.

I feel that in my own little plot of land, over in Annandale, where I've been working to bring the fruit of the earth from my own four-by-eight patches of heavy Virginia clay.

Gardens are good, honest work.  They nourish us and feed us, and that nourishment goes well beyond the delicious, local and fresh food they provide.

As my pastoral imagination is discovering, they are also a nearly endless font of metaphors for faith.  Lord help the congregation.

This year and last, it's been green beans at this point in the season.  I went with bush beans last year, for the sole reason that I saw a packet of them at the supermarket, said to myself "Ooo I'd like to grow beans," and went with it.

Honestly, I thought I was buying pole beans, which are much, much more productive on a small plot.  But we often don't pay attention during an impulse buy, because, you know, it's an impulse.  Oops.  Those seeds did well, though, filling my family table with green beans for over a month, and giving me enough to share.  They did so well that I decided I was up for it again.

I selectively seed-saved them from last year.  I over-saved, in fact, meaning I ended up with way more seed than I needed.  That meant that I was going to go with bush beans again this year, no question.  But it also meant that this year, I wanted to try something different with those beans.  An experiment in weed control, if you will.

The instructions for the beans suggested planting in widely separated rows, with plants a good distance apart.  I'd done that last year, and the plants had done well.  They had lots of light between them, and lots of distance and space to expand.  But that distance made room for the weeds, which proceeded to grow fiercely in the spaces between the plants.  I had to attend them to on a semi-daily basis, which I kinda sorta did.

This year, I thought about those bushy plants, and the shade they'd cast if I let them nestle up a bit closer together.  So three rows on the plot became four rows.  The space between the plants went from a foot to eight inches.  I prepped the clay with richer earth, and aerated the soil, and laid the seeds in.

The plants shot up fast in the well-prepared soil, and after the first month, I found that I no longer needed to weed.  They'd grown up so thick and so tall that they'd woven themselves into a single cohesive thing.  They were capturing all of the light, forming a dense canopy over the soil.  Bending down and peering through them at ground level, it was like a forest of towering trees, beneath which very little else could grow.  Every one of those bush bean plants was helping every other one of those bush bean plants.  They were working together, keeping other plants from taking the nutrients and light that would fuel their growth.

They seemed...happier...together.  Not to mention that their yield has been a little overwhelming.  Green bean casserole, anyone?  Baked cornbread battered greenbeans? How about a green bean smoothie?  Hmmm.  Maybe stick with the casserole.

If we want to live a gracious life, one defined by the Way that Jesus taught, it's helpful to approach our thoughts and actions in the same way those beans have flourished.

We all want to be good, want to shape ourselves as good people.  The peculiar thing about grace and kindness is that it thrives the more we act upon it.  Every good act supports every other good act, like bean plants that knit themselves together to form a canopy.  If we space our opportunities to express grace into the world too far apart, distracted by busyness or stress, we leave room for "weeds" and the influx of other, more negative ways of being.

It's why getting into the habit of showing simple kindnesses, mercy and forgiveness is so important.  Growing those moments so thick that they form a canopy of grace is a good way to grow as a human being.

As we tend to the gardens of our souls, it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Beans and Compassion

All summer long, I've been tending them.

They weren't much to look at, those little bushes, filling a three by ten foot plot to the right of our driveway.  In those first days of summer, they'd had a hard start of it, as life often does.  Some never made it much past being shoots, and then withered and died.  Others looked promising at first, but then marauding bunnies nibbled off their tender first leaves, and starved of life-giving light, they hardened into dead twigs.

Every morning, I tended them.  A little weeding, and a little water as needed.  Where one died or was devoured, I replanted.  Some struggled to stay upright as they grew, so I'd lay in a little stake next to them and give them a boost towards the sun.

By late summer they still weren't much to look at.  Just a dozen or so nondescript plants, the tallest barely reaching my knees.  But under their leaves could be found, every other day, a festival of green beans.  They'd spring into being, leaping forth from the tiny white flowers.

I still tended them, and watered them as needed.   And every other day, I'd spend ten minutes harvesting.  For a couple of months, we had beans enough to fill our four plates twice a week.  More than enough, in fact.  Ziplock bags full of freshly picked beans made their way into the hands of family and neighbors.

As the growing season drew to a close, though, the time was going to come when those humble little bushes would stop yielding.   And having spent the summer with them, I felt their identity as living things rather more intensely than I would had I bought a bag of flash-frozen beans from Trader Joes.

They're pretty basic beings, greenbeans.  They pour all their energy into growth, as a single bean contains the data and energy needed to turn the sun's light and the nutrients in soil into shoots and leaves.  If they have a purpose, and all living things need to have purpose, it is to make more beans.  The beans are, after all, their past and their future.  Their children.  The next generation.  That is pretty much the entirety of what they do, and in so far as such a simple, sub-sentient living creature has an identity, that's who they are.

So as summer waned to fall, I marked certain beans with tape, particularly on my largest and most vigorous plants.  Those beans I allowed to grow and grow, and then to yellow and wither.  When they dried out, I popped them from the plants.  Each of those dried beans yielded three or four perfect seeds, utterly indistinguishable from those that tumbled out of the packet I bought from Burpee back in the late spring.

I let them dry further, and then all went into a little jar, which I'll soon seal up with some moisture-absorbing material.  Seed enough for fifty or more plants now inhabit that jar.  On the one hand, that's the practical thing to do, and will save me a couple of bucks come next summer.  Why pay for seed, when your plants will give it to you for free?  My Scots blood burbles happily in my veins at such a delightful opportunity for thrift.

But thrift wasn't really the motivation for saving seed.  I felt a peculiar but inescapable gratitude to these simple living things. I've tended them, nurtured them, and cared for them.  I know that their entire purpose is for more beans, their offspring, to grow next year.  In exchange, all summer long, they've fed me and my loved ones.  I know that more beans are the simple purpose of those simple things.

Having gotten to know them, it seemed the least I could do to help make that happen.

The Gardener

As my schedule has become more flexible over the last six months, I've found myself spending more time in our garden.   We occupy the suburban standard quarter-acre, with a sunny and well-lit front yard and a treed and fenced back yard.  Neither saw particularly much attention over the first decade or so that we've owned the house.  With little kids and full-time jobs and grad school, just getting out and mowing was about as much care as I could provide.  Our back yard barely even needed that, as the frantic scramblings of our hyperkinetic dog obliterated what had once been a lush yard.  It reached a point where the yard looked more like a dirt lot, or a heavily used elementary school soccer field at the end of a long season.

There's a bit more breathing room in life now, and I began the season by working and reseeding our back yard.   Given some attention and watering, the grass is back.   But with the growing of grass, I found myself wanting to get more dirt under my nails.  So I have.  I've been able get out into the garden and do more than run a thrumming four-stroke mulching mower through a cloud of recently released cis-3-Hexenal.   With so much potential for growth, it seems silly to be using that time to just grow plants that don't bear fruit.

So over the course of the last month, a splotch of browning neglected elephant grass in front of our house has disappeared, and in its place has appeared the first growth of a strawberry patch.   A pair of planters in our back yard that were mostly used for growing a miscellany of weeds have also found themselves suddenly sprouting strawberries.   A blackberry and a troika of blueberry bush plantings now sit near a sun-drenched front wall of our home.  In the next month, the odds are good that a pair of dwarf apple trees will rise next to the two lovely dogwoods in the front of our house.

The dirt and the weeding and the digging is a welcome change from the omnipresent screen-time and car-errand-schlepping that can otherwise fill my day.  I like the feeling of it, frankly.  It changes the focus of life, and brings a deeper awareness of the natural cycles around me.   You feel a drought more when you're trying to get life to rise from the earth.  The rain feels more welcome.   Adding that to my pattern of living feels like it deepens my connection with the living world around me.

And that is welcome thing.