Master of the Spade

It seems that it would be good in one's lifetime to master something. This might well be a universal longing and yet gone terribly awry in our modern Babylonian times. We are content to have the appearance of mastering something rather than mastery itself. The best example I can think of is the great number of men (seems to always be men) who hike up their pants, sniff like Barney Fife, and announce "Yeah, I'm a licensed pilot... did I mention I was a licensed pilot." Now these men have no prospects of ever owning an airplane nor being hired by anyone else to fly theirs. They've saved up their pennies and bought lessons and aviation fuel a mirror in front of which to practice swaggering ... "Yeah, ... me and the other flyboys..." But I'm talking about really mastering something, not buying an extension of our private parts.

So I set about to genuinely master something ... the shovel!

In another blog I outlined how we arrived at the present oil based economy. Let me weave just such a thread about our food, only I will have to go much farther into the past. Wheat is a convenient food in that it has a good balance of protein and carbs and preserves well. It's drawback is that its high protein content requires nitrogen rich ground. As wheat culture spread from its beginnings several millenia ago in Iraq to Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa, it left behind it the land it had exhausted and eroded.

The story is told that this is how western civilization came about. The Greeks overcropped wheat to such an extent that they permanently eroded away the top soil and so were forced to find crops that would grow on the subsoil: grapes and olives. Lack of grain forced them into making pottery to store the wine and oil, ships to transport it, a writing system and common language for trading in it, and eventually the development of coinage.

At any rate, just after the advance of wheat culture was halted by running into the Atlantic Ocean and thus not able to just move on to the next plot of fertile ground, famines began to be common. Great monocrops of wheat (or anything for that matter) are an invitation to catastrophe and catastrophe has never been inclined to turn down an invitation. Until the 1500's in Europe there was a severe famine one year in seven.

This changed with the age of exploration which brought new fields to be plowed for wheat in the Americas, Africa, India, Australia and introduced new foods into Europe from those continents. Famine was not nearly so common after that time. So wheat culture made its way across every temperate climate with new ground falling under the plow every year .... until suddenly one year there was no more arable land to claim. The year agrominists generally establish as when there was no more land that could be effecively plowed is 1960.

Since we could not just plow more and more land as we had done for 500 years, it was about that time that the specter of periodic and devastating famine reared its head once more. To address this we brought about the so called "Green Revolution." Since we couldn't plant more and more land, we set about to make the land we had produce more and more crops. This was done through plant breeding and hybridization, chemical fertilizers, irrigation, and mechanized farming. All of these are interdependent. The new breeds of plants are only high yielding if plied with chemical fertilizers, over watered by irrigation, and mechanically tended and harvested.

Over the past half centruy, fueled with a supply of fossil fuel treated as if it were endless, crop yields doubled, then doubled again. Alas we have come to an obsticle. You can't just keep doubling crop yields on the same ground forever. Even with damming off many of the world's major rivers so that they no longer flow to the sea at all (such as the Colorado in the US), applying vast amounts of chemical salts to the ground, and mechanically tilling the ground until several feet of depth have eroded away, we have just kept up with the food demands of an ever increasing population. But we have no more water to exploit, are near to depleting the top soil ... and if that don't chuck the biscuits in the creek ... we're running out of oil.

It does not bode well.

The only weapon we have to combat the looming famine is the spade. When I first began my earnest apprenticeship to the Art of the Spade more than thirty years go, there was real hope for the world ... if only they'd listened. They didn't. Now I am not sure there's time.

So like a few vestigal Jedi warriors in reclusion on the fringes of things, I follow the Way fo the Spade. I've got a few years on me now, and yet I manage to turn 16,000 sq ft of ground every year (usually twice in a year) with only a spade I got at the Mart for $3.50.

A spade like this cost very little in the way of resources to produce, it might last 100 years or more, and it has managed to feed a large family for years. Moreover it only just disturbs the soil enough to mix in the organic material and foil the weeds. It does not churn the soil as does plowing and harrowing and it doesn't create a hardpan. Hand tended soil, in practice, does not erode. Quite the contrary, the soil of this garden was hard blue clay seventeen years ago and after that many years of organic amendments, it is soft and pliable enough for an aging Master to work it for some time to come.

The Way of the Spade does not lend itself to swaggering. The crows and beetles and nettles are the only witnesses to such mastery.

What Harm Can Befall Thee?

"Go east of your dream and farm
Let peace and silence spin your yarn,
What harm can befall thee
In yon wilderness of clove?"
(From Seals & Croft East of Ginger Trees)

It was Laura's post about one of the Contrary Goddess' that provoked me into starting this blog, although I had planned to for some time. It never ceases to amuse how different people can read the same thing and view it so differently. I remember reading a description once of Van Gogh's Starry Night as the universe writhing in cataclysmic throws of destruction. Really? I had always though it conveyed a very deep sense of peace and well being. So when I read about the Heaven/Hell duality and assigning them alike to the infernal and not mourning their passing, I nodded in ackowledgement.

You see, one does not mourn their passing because they are only illusions, fabrications of our own making, tales told by a sock puppet, signinfying nothing. What does God really think of all the ills with which we so much concern ourselves? What does She think about injustice, inequality, bigotry, discrimination, and all such? I went to ask.

The photo is the entrance to the 3/4 acre "flat" shelf where the Free Man's Garden is located. Flat ground is very rare here in the mountains and so this spit of ground presented itself from the onset as the place for the gardens and most of the orchards and vinyards. Once one passes into this realm, Nature alone sets the reality. Using only hand tools and only organic and biodynamic methods the gardener must persuade Nature to yield enough food for a large family each year. What does She respond to?

First, what does She NOT respond to? I have never found Nature to care a wit whether the gardener was male or female. I don't mean that She respects the unique qualities that are male, or honors the female. I mean She is absolutely indifferent to it. A beet seed planted by a man behaves exactly like a beet seed panted by a woman. Exactly. Mulch suppresses the weeds absolutely the same whether a man or woman applied it. In fact after a days work and the gardener's shadow fades from the plots, the observer is utterly unable to discern whether it had been a man or a woman there. Nature is not sexist, but that doesn't mean she respects men and women alike, it means that for Her, the distinction does not exist at all.

Nor have I found a difference whether the gardener was young or old, tall or short, fat or thin, of any nationality, any language, any religion or none. Nor does She care how much money the gardener has in his or her pocket, what education they have, how attractive they are, what their opinion is.

Nature only responds to what the gardener chooses to do, that and nothing else. Now with all the tales told by sock puppets I've heard, I have yet to consider one to trump what God has to say directly through Nature. The example of Nature is not that we are to respect the sexes alike, or nationalities alike, or religions alike. The example is that those distinctions do not exist once one enters the garden. And the world outside the garden is insubstantial by comparison and fades farther and farther from God as one gets farther and farther from the garden.

Why mourn the passing of things that from the Gardener's point of view do not exist at all?