There’s a wonderful movement promoting growing food rather than grass in front of our homes: Grow food not lawns. https://www.foodnotlawns.com/
On their website are photos of lush gardens where more ‘traditional’ houses have lawns. More than that, however, this movement encourages the growth of food for neighbours to share. I knew a couple who did this for some years, in a community where many people could not easily afford fresh food. As they worked in their garden these friends met people, often offering them food, and in a beautiful way they were building community.
Growing food is an immensely important habit of life.
I come from a family where we were dependent upon our dad’s veggie garden. Six children need a lot of food—and we were all expected to help grow some of it. As a result, my veggie garden has been one of the stable continuities of my life too, wherever I have lived. In our childhood home, before the times of deep freezers or vacuum packing, we preserved dozens of bottles of veggies for the winter months. None of that meant that we ever liked boiled cabbage, however!
Growing things also creates opportunities for enriching friendships. One of the strongest memories of my father’s garden is seeing visitors to our home leave with an armful of fresh, healthy food.
As I reflect upon this ‘habit of life’ the first thing I want to say is that growing things brings us closer to the earth. It is deeply unfortunate that so many people live without immediate and regular contact with the earth. We need to feel the soil, preferably under our fingernails! In reality, we live from the earth, as also we ultimately go to the earth. The earth, the soil and the air, provide us with life. Growing things helps us to see this, literally, and to remember that in the most fundamental ways life is a gift. Although gardeners have may skills and ways of enriching their gardens, we cannot make things grow. We contribute to what nature is giving.
It’s also important to recognise that always something will grow. I have often reflected upon the capacity of weeds to grow in the cracks in the footpath, and noticed how large trees can grow in a crevice on a rock-face. Life asserts itself. Seeds may fall and life emerges. This reality means that we have a choice about what we will grow. If you leave an area of land, things will grow: weeds, thistles, brambles. Or flowers, ferns and food.
We have a choice, and we can further enrich what grows. Skilled gardeners always mention the fundamental importance of soil quality and drainage. Composting, which itself is a vital part of the circular economy of food, is an important part of the gardener’s practice. Recently in many cities, people who have a garden have invited neighbours who live in apartments where they cannot have a garden to contribute their food scraps to their composting. Our municipality now does with on a city-wide scale.
Recently a friend told me this had not been a good summer for tomatoes. For me, that was last year. This year we’ve had an excellent crop, been able to share lots and preserve many more as well. So too with beans. When gardeners talk about things like this, you learn further things, like that after you have a good crop of tomatoes, the soil will be somewhat depleted of nitrogen and unsuitable for immediately planting winter vegetables such as broccoli, unless you add some enrichment.
Finally it seems important to say that growing things requires patience, and acceptance that we are not in control here. We are dependent upon the bees doing their role in it all. We depend on the weather, which mostly enhances but can also destroy or undo what we were hoping to grow. One day of strong wind took all the blossom from a fruit tree, which had promised a really good harvest.
In the end, growing things is a partnership with nature, and we do well to receive its gifts with thankfulness.
While I have been speaking about growing food, there are many other things we grow as well: literally, in the sense of flowers and trees, and then in many other senses, such as nurturing relationships, groups, community. The things I’ve affirmed about growing food also apply in their own ways to growing and sharing other things—and indeed to life itself. We need to nourish the soil in which life grows, in partnership with the inherent life of the creation. Growing things, in so many ways, is a habit of life.