My Garden Is My Home

On my wall is a late 19th century photo of a group of Italian men standing in a cultivated field in the California foothill town of Mokelumne Hill. Three watch as a fourth man works a plow behind a pair of horses. The watchers wear fedoras. One has a cigar in his mouth and what looks like a jug of wine in his hand. One of these men was my great-grandfather's brother who persuaded my great-grandfather to leave Italy and come to California to help in his market garden.

My great-grandfather ended up working in a hard-rock gold mine, but his passion, by all accounts, was gardening and he was in great demand as a skilled grafter of vines.

My grandfather inherited the passion for working the soil. After he retired, he dug an immense garden in his backyard and amended the soil with truckloads of horse manure. His garden was lush and chaotic and became a regular stop for friends and family in need of a few tomatoes or sweet red onions.

My father inherited the intention, if not the skill, to garden. His gardening was primarily a late afternoon affair done with a hose in one hand and a martini in the other. But there was always a vegetable garden in the empty lot next to our house and summer inevitably meant the smell of water soaking into clay followed by a cascade of tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, and corn.

So apparently the dirt under my fingernails is a hereditary condition.

But it took more than a few dirty genes to cause me to spend my days on hands and knees in the hot sun trying to coax a little exotic beauty out of soil that would prefer to just shrink and swell and grow annual grasses and an occasional oak. There were a few environmental factors that started me down the organic gardening path and have kept me on it.

A book. In 1975 I came across a book called "How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine)". The author, John Jeavons, documented astounding yields from his Palo Alto bio-intensive garden. Using permanent wide beds, double-digging, organic amendments, and close spacing, the bio-intensive method promised small landholders subsistence on as little as 1100 sq. ft. It promised to save the world from agribusiness. This appealed to me. I made my first bio-intensive bed that year. I've been lying in it ever since.

A garden. After college, I decided to compost my liberal arts degree and study Horticulture. On a field trip to the Mudd's Restaurant garden in San Ramon I saw basil that was far more robust than my own. I had to find out what they were doing that I wasn't. I asked to volunteer. Instead I was hired. I spent the next 19 years at that garden trying to show that beauty, health, and productivity could peacefully co-exist.

A sense of place. I grew up in Alamo when it was still mostly rural. I spent my time exploring the hills behind my house, digging up fossils, following deer trails through the coyote brush, listening to hawks and jays, eating apples from long-abandoned orchards. Indoors was never big enough or wild enough. Gardening has kept me outside. And gardening without mechanical contraptions has allowed me to hear the birds and smell the earth and feel the first faint sea breezes during a heat-wave.

A perpetual state of amazement. In a tablespoon of soil there are billions of microbes doing the the unseen groundwork of life. Organic gardening is all about the care and feeding of those creatures. Digging, amending, planting, even weeding, I feel as though I'm engaged with something mysterious and profound. Everyday I see life arising from the matrix of seeds, soil, water, and sunlight. And when I plant a seed and nurture it along and return the spent plant to the soil to nurture other life, I become a very small part of the matrix. It may be a far cry from what passes for gardening these days, the full-scale assault on nature with pesticides, herbicides, mowers, and blowers, but it just feels right.   As naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. 

I tend to agree.