On the economy of plants and hard virtues

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

From "Stay Home" by Wendell Berry

On Wednesday night, I went next door to Warren Wilson College to see Wendell Berry with Christopher and my parents. The crowd at the college chapel where Mr. Berry spoke was so huge that we ended up watching and listening with a couple of hundred other people on a live feed from another building on campus. In his deeply humble and entirely unpretentious way, Mr. Berry read one of his short stories, At Home, and then answered a few questions from students.

At Home is a story of small details, a beautiful embodiment of Wendell Berry's ethic and way of life. His reading was slow, deliberate, and quiet. For me, listening to the story required a disciplined effort to slow my mind down and be still and patient. The pace of the story, and of Wendell Berry's whole way of being, was so radically slow compared to the pace of computers, cars, and smartphones in the world in which I usually live. Berry's words were so evocative and his pace so meditative that I almost felt like I was dreaming.

"He could not distinguish between himself and the land," Berry writes of the central character in "At Home." I emerged from "At Home" with a deep calling to my own home and land, to which I have been gradually becoming more and more inextricably connected over the past five years. Will there come a time when I can no longer distinguish myself from the land? I hope so.

After the reading was finished, Mr. Berry responded to questions from students - I first wrote "answered questions" and then realized that he was reluctant to provide "answers" in most cases, but instead gave subtle, thoughtful responses, often lightened with wry humor.

I was jotting notes as he spoke, still moving somewhat slowly after being immersed in the world of Berry's short story, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

In response to questions from students about how we can find our way out of the ecological predicament we have created: "Problem solving is not applying the maximum force as relentlessly as possible. It requires patience, resignation, and other hard virtues." And later, "No one knows the answer. Don't trust anyone who says they do. The answer will have to be lived out." And finally, "We are working from the inside, necessity is working from the outside. The world is not going to continue to yield what we have come to expect of it."

In response to a question about how "people of faith" might be involved in the environmental movement: "It's hard to think of a person who doesn't have faith in something. The human mind is by nature faithful."

He encouraged students to "Get your language right. Call things by their right names." He talked about health in communities, referencing Aldo Leopold's concept of "land community" (a concept he fleshes out in more detail in his essay "Conservation and Local Economy").

When asked about Occupy Wall Street, he reminded us that "great public movements must be accompanied by local, small, private acts." He also noted that when we are told, "inform yourself," we should remember that "to inform is to shape inwardly."

He talked about making local food economies "that will be the kindest to the home landscapes of the world."

At the end of the evening, Mr. Berry repeated twice what he called one of his "articles of faith": "Things aren't going to get so bad that someone who is willing can't make it a little better."

That is the kind of hope, small and persistent, that I can feel resonating in my heart and bones. Thank you, Wendell Berry.

More from Wendell Berry:

"We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it. There is no plainer symptom of our insanity than our avowed intention to maintain by fire an unlimited economic growth. Fire destroys what nourishes it and so in fact imposes severe limits on any growth associated with it. The true source and analogue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay. We must learn to grow like a tree, not like a fire."

Read a longer excerpt from Berry's essay "Conservation and Local Economy," here.

Read the essay "Word and Flesh" here.

Read a profile of Wendell Berry in "Grist" here.

Creature Comforts

File under: Things we wouldn't get to do if we had a Big Farm. Rescuing woolly worms. A photo from late winter/early spring that I meant to post back then but lost track of.

They were everywhere! We tried to relocate them to alternate warm spots whenever our gardening activities exposed them.

Given the onslaught of insects we've been encountering lately that DON'T bring a smile to our faces, it seemed appropriate to remember the sweetness of discovering sleeping woolly worms in the garden.

Invoking Spring

The snow is melting today, pussywillows are beginning to bloom, and the redwing blackbirds have returned.   The expectation of Spring is so thick you can taste it!  

It feels like time to summon Spring.  

 

Invocation

by May Sarton

Come out of the dark earth 
Here where the minerals 
Glow in their stone cells 
Deeper than seed or birth. 

Come under the strong wave 
Here where the tug goes 
As the tide turns and flows 
Below that architrave. 

Come into the pure air 

Above all heaviness 

Of storm and cloud to this  

Light-possessed atmosphere.  

Come into, out of, under  

The earth, the wave, the air. 

Love, touch us everywhere  

With primeval candor. 

May Sarton

1912-1995

Presente!

One Day in the Century of the Small: Broadforking

''Who knows, perhaps that's what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big countries, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me.''

-Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good

At left: Christopher uses a borrowed broadfork to cultivate a new garden bed for garlic.

Several years ago I wrote an article for our local weekly newspaper with some policy ideas for our new City Council. To my chagrin, the editor changed the title at the last minute to "Think Big." I winced when I saw the article in print. "No! If anything I would have called it 'Think SMALL!' " I remember wailing.

I've never bought the bombast of the "bigger, faster, newer" credo of American consumer culture -- and when I started hearing about the Small is Beautiful movement, it resonated with my intuitive sense of the value of simplicity. Then, some years ago, I read Arundhati Roy's essay quoted above (the link above goes to a site where you can read the whole thing online, or you can buy the beautiful print edition here).

Yes! The century of the small. The century of the simple. The century of slowness. The century of worms and microbes hard at work in a compost pile. The century of handmade objects rubbed smooth by many hands. A time for clothespins and cast iron to replace driers and microwaves. An era when sing-alongs and craft circles and clothes swaps become more popular than video games and Walmart and designer labels. A time of small farms, small businesses, and small homes. The century of the grassroots. So may it be!

The broadfork is a great tool for this new century. It is a perfect example of appropriate technology: a small-scale, simple tool powered by human energy rather than petroleum, a tool that works at a pace and on a scale that are in step with the rhythms of the natural world.

Appropriate technology is one of the concepts illuminated in the famous 1973 collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered . Schumacher and others in the Small is Beautiful and related simplicity movements came to define appropriate technology with four characteristics: appropriate technologies are simple, small in scale, low-cost and non-violent.

Earlier this year, I wrote about one of the non-violent aspects of deciding not to till--saving the salamanders. There are much wider environmental benefits to cultivating the soil by hand -- of course there is the energy savings (or more accurately, the substitution of human, worm, salamander, and microbe energy for petro-energy), but also soil ecology and soil structure are preserved, and erosion and runoff are less likely. So it's one less contribution to the more subtle, creeping violence of human activity damaging systems of life on the planet. And to me it just feels right. Working the soil by hand, I feel more peaceful, more graceful, more in harmony with the earth and its webs of overlapping systems and patterns and cycles than I do when using a loud, fast, petro-powered machine.

So far, all of the cultivation that we have done on our 5 acres has been either by double-digging raised beds or by broadforking mounded wide rows. We've cultivated about 1,200 square feet so far in the past two years with these simple tools.

Left: Christopher takes stock of 40 foot-long wide row he's broadforked.
Below: Triumphant after double- digging our first two raised beds in 2006.

We also use heavy mulches on all of these beds year round to protect soil nutrients and conserve water, and we add compost and organic matter to the beds before every new planting. Most of our beds are polyculture gardens/ companion plantings, as well, rather than just rows of a single crop. We've been able to space plants much more closely than you would in row-cropping by using these methods, and we've grown a lot of food in these beds.

Above: planting in a double-dug raised bed, Spring 2008

No-till combined with mulches, raised beds, and soil and water conservation techniques are all elements of what is sometimes referred to as "biointensive" farming. "Biointensive" is a word that is defined in a variety of different ways by people practicing different methods, but here's more about biointensive farming from an organization whose definition pretty much matches mine. And there are lots of great links on the wiki page for "biointensive" -- including information about French intensive methods and other old biointensive traditions and further reading.

Biointensive polyculture in a "keyhole" bed in our garden this summer

I believe that all food-growing was what is now called biointensive for most of human history, just as all food was organic until relatively recently. (See Farmers of Forty Centuries for more about how people grew food for thousands of years before modern farming took a turn for the worse).

Modern, petro-powered, non-intensive farming was an invention of 20th century America -- coming out of a paradigm based on the false assumption of unlimited resources. Monoculture became the standard way growing food, and farmers started departing from traditional methods -- spreading out, depleting the soil, adding petrochemical fertilizers rather than organic materials, and wasting lots and lots of water, not to mention washing away precious topsoil. The radically different idea behind the various biointensive approaches is to conserve and even increase resources, including topsoil, soil ecology, water, and energy.

So, back to our own Adventures in Smallness and Simplicity: Christopher borrowed a broadfork from the Warren Wilson garden crew, and over the last month or so cultivated about 480 square feet for garlic beds. In these beds we planted 1,489 cloves of garlic, of thirteen different varieties. Sometime next July or so we'll harvest almost 1,500 heads of garlic.

Before we dig beds with either a broadfork or shovels, we let the areas to be cultivated sit under thick cardboard and straw sheet mulch for at least a few months -- preferably for six months or more over the winter with plenty of rain. Worms, microorganisms, macroorganisms (mice and salamanders, for instance), moisture and rotting organic matter do a lot of work for us before we break ground, and then we pick up with the broadfork or shovels where they left off.

We figure that from start to finish (clearing, sheetmulching, cultivating, and prepping) this method takes about 10 person hours per 100 square feet of garden bed. It's time and labor intensive, but only the first year. Once permanent beds are double-dug or otherwise deeply cultivated, and if they are maintained with mulch and protected from being walked on, they are much easier to re-work in future years. We've planted in some of our raised beds 4 or 5 times by now, and it requires almost zero time and energy to cultivate the beds after the first year if they've been protected. We're planning to cultivate another 500 square feet or so with these methods before spring comes.

It works. And it feels good. And as my Dad tells me my grandfather used to say, "when you go slowly, there's more time to correct your mistakes."

Long live slowness! Welcome to the century of small and simple technology! Let's bring it!