Essay: How & Why We Garden (and Wild Church reminder)

Plus: Spring Equinox Wild Church, Saturday, 3pm.

Full Wild Church schedule here. This Saturday, 3pm, we’ll gather at the special site, Casper Bluff (870 S. Pilot Knob Rd., Galena, IL) Please bring a chair.

Essay: How and Why We Garden

People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Nine years ago, on the bright, warm day we arrived to this place we would name after the patron of gardeners and farmers, in this southwest corner of Wisconsin not far from the Mississippi River, I excitedly grabbed a shovel and went out into the garden to begin digging. As I stuck my hands into the clumpy earth, my heart sank just a little bit as it became clearer why exactly it was that road to which we had moved had been named Clay Hollow.

Since then, a significant part of our work has been dedicated to increasing the fertility and workability of our topsoil while expanding our growing space.

That first summer, we doubled the size of the garden on the front lawn through a process of “sheet mulching” - rather than tilling the grass under, we built the garden right on top of the grass. First, we cut the lawn as short as our mower would allow. Then, after aerating and watering the area, we suppressed the grass with a heavy layer of wet cardboard. To that, we added an inch of compost (we used a combination of food scraps, cow manure, and fresh grass clippings); and finally added a foot-thick layer of hay mulch. Over the Winter and following Spring, the grass died back as the compost - assisted by earthworms and microbial creatures - broke up the clay by working its way into the aerated ground beneath. When the ground warmed, we peeled back the hay and planted squash into the rich loam that had been created.

A few years later, we fenced two pigs into an area with grasses and Queen Anne’s Lace so tall that the animals were lost within them. After a few months of rooting around for grubs and worms, the pigs had turned this forty-by-eighty-foot area of impenetrable weeds into bare soil ready to be tilled by a neighbor. Following guidance from small-scale organic farmers trying to avoid soil compaction (like Noonday CW Farm in Massachusetts, where Brenna had interned), into this garden we established permanent beds - raised mounds of earth upon which we never walk or use machinery.

Our four-foot-wide beds are about six inches from the ground, and have eighteen-inch walking paths between them. This system eliminates the need for tilling before each planting and enables better soil drainage in this climate of heavy rain. The loose soil structure, too, welcomes beneficial microorganisms and encourages deeper root growth. We have begun to refer to this area as “Hildegarden,” after the medieval ecological mystic who understood the Divine as a greening, animating presence within the living world.

Though we are still very much learners - occasionally holding a hoe in one hand and an open gardening book in the other - we have also grown over the years in our knowledge and skill. Inspired by practices that have recently been popularized as “permacultural” or “regenerative,” but are in fact ways in which Indigenous people have stewarded the land for millennia, we have gradually adopted a set of unofficial, flexible principles or guidelines for the way we engage with the soil:

Minimize soil disturbance. The invention of the steel plow by John Deere nearly two centuries ago was a devastating turning point that led to the uprooting of the Prairie and the release into the atmosphere of tons of carbon that had been buried in the soil for centuries. Repairing that damage invites us to avoid the practice of tilling, which - while it may break up compacted soil in the short term - ultimately damages soil structure and leads to compaction, increases the likelihood of soil erosion, and releases carbon.

While we will occasionally use stirrup hoes for light weeding and shallow cultivation, we primarily improve our soil structure through the building up of organic matter (composted manure, hay and leaf mulch) on top of the beds. In the Fall, when we’re putting the beds to rest for the cold, we’re now even cutting the dead stalks where they meet with the surface, rather than pulling them up by the roots, letting the microorganisms eat on these roots and clearing them by Spring. Healthy, undisturbed soil sinks carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil, mitigating climate change in the process.

Keep the soil covered as much as possible. We understand that the soil is the skin of Mother Earth, and so we take seriously the need to protect her. Mimicking the land, which abhors bare ground and always keeps herself covered, we layer our bare soil with mulch - usually hay, which we always have on hand. The mulch helps not only stifle weed growth and protect against erosion, but also, by holding in moisture, minimizes our need to irrigate. During the late fall frosts, the hay helps insulate the ground, encouraging earthworms, who keep the soil loose and airy, to remain closer to the surface. During the growing season, we sow cover crops like buckwheat, peas, and oats on recently harvested beds in order to keep the soil covered, to suppress weeds, and to allow their roots to activate the microbes beneath the surface.

Share the abundance. As we nourish the soil, we are in turn are nourished by what the soil offers us - a profound testament to the fundamental unity between us and the land. And we are often nourished in tremendous abundance. Not only do we eat well during the growing season and store the bounty through canning and freezing, but we also have enough to share this nutritious food with our many visitors and the wider community, often providing this food as a regular gift to those who couldn’t otherwise afford organic produce and grass-fed dairy products. While we do sell a few things, the fruits of the garden for the most part end up on our table or are gifted to others. Amid rising food costs and a fickle market, raising our own food provides a space for us to meet some of our own needs while supporting others amid precarious situations.

Embrace diversity. In any ecosystem, and especially in a garden, diversity is resiliency. In a monoculture, a disease or a pest can have disastrous impacts, wiping out the entire crop. The greater the plant diversity, the better chance those plants will survive and thrive. Each year, depending on rainfall and temperature, there will be some crops who struggle as well as those who thrive. Each plant not only offers its gifts but also takes from the soil. This means that we rotate where we plant our vegetables each year, in order to allow the earth to recover its health after hosting a particularly heavy-nitrogen feeding plant, for example. Cover crops, too, not only encourage soil health but also attract more life and diversity, their flowers sometimes drawing thousands of pollinators.

Value the edge. Ecologists use the word “ecotone” to name the place where different ecosystems come together - where a field meets a forest, for example, or where ocean and shore connect. It is these liminal places, the edges and margins, where life flourishes most. The edge, often forgotten both in society and in the garden, is where life is most abundant.

Here at St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm, we make use of the already-existing fences that surround our two gardens to grow beans, peas, cucumbers, and other climbers. This Spring, we will plant over 50 native shrubs - Ninebark, Highbush Cranberry, and Hazelnuts from the local county tree sale - amid the already-growing and thriving Oaks. Placed along the edges of the fields, these plantings provide not only a wind break, but also a new ecotone, a region of transition between the two biological communities of field and forest where habitat for myriad creatures abounds. In turn, we ourselves will be nourished by the presence and beauty of birds and other creatures.

A couple of years ago, while pulling weeds in one of our patches of restored Prairie, I realized that this, too, was gardening. If gardens can be any place where human hands mix with the life of the land, then I am beginning to see the entirety of this 25 acres as a garden. It is, after all, a place we tend, a place with which we interact and engage to bring forth life.

This work of gardening offers our community a rhythm that orients us in this beautiful, fragile and increasingly troubled world. We understand these acts of gardening, this work of nourishing life and in turn being nourished by life, as part of our original vocation to be caretakers of and servants to the land. Whatever work in which we engage - from activism and community building to celebration and cooking - our daily lives are ultimately rooted in and formed by this fundamental, joyful, and - yes - sometimes exhausting work.

***You are welcome to join us for a day or work on the land planting shrubs on Saturday, April 19th. Inquire for more details.