Barbara Kingsolver’s describes her marvellously productive garden in her memoir of a gardening year, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
We spent the July 4th weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes.
In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o.
In Mary, we’d set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand.
In another month, they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.
This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvellous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden.
Fuelled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans full out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt.
Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer’s heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes.
The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us.”|
What an amazing description of abundance, fuelled by…nothing really, seed, soil, water, air…
Can anyone read this and doubt we live in an abundant universe, a benevolent universe blessed by God?
* * *
And yet, eighteen people die of starvation each minute, eighteen while I have written and you have read this.
Large-scale systemic failures, war and corruption, environmental plunder, degradation and collapse all play a role in this.
* * *
Our friends who worked with Heidi Baker described the widespread hunger in Mozambique.
Yet Mozambique, according to my research has rich and extensive natural resources, five rivers, heavy rainfall.
My friends described going through the bush with trucks of food, and people fighting like wolves for the food.
Would it not have been more effective to also distribute seeds?
Seeds: would that solve the problem of hunger on the micro-level, despite systemic problems of distribution, environmental degradation and global warming?
“Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels.
I do believe it.
I believe with Heidi Baker that there is always enough, both for the reasons she gives, and because of the abundance God has encoded in seeds: dozens of tomatoes, thousands of apples over generations from a single seed.
Vegetables can be grown in plastic bags or plastic bottles, or using hydroponics in minimal soil.
Teaching people to grow vegetables: on a micro-level, could this be a simple, overlooked solution to world hunger?
Read my new memoir: Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India (US) or UK.
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My book of essays: Wandering Between Two Worlds (US) or UK
Joanna Dobson says
Yes we do need much, much more widespread knowledge about how to get food from a seed, not least in the West where one of the deceptions we live by is that food comes from money. However, as soon as you start looking into it you come smack bang against the huge injustices around land distribution. Even worse, many multinational companies are now taking out patents on seeds, trapping tens of thousands of farmers into a kind of slavery that is reckoned to have led to more than 250,000 suicides in India alone. I agree that God has made the earth a place of abundance and in the light of that, seed patenting is a terrible evil. More information here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/vandana-shiva-corporate-monopoly-seeds
Anita Mathias says
Yes, the book I am reading, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has a brilliant chapter on seed patenting. Yes, I was aware of the suicides to do with seed patenting. Very sad.
Prochaskas says
It sounds good, but simplistic?
Every time I try to grow certain things, like zucchini, they get decimated by squash bugs — I don’t want to use pesticides. I go pick them off and drown them in soapy water, but I usually can’t keep up. I can grow other things successfully and organically, but not everything.
And how can a culture have developed that has lost the knowledge of growing food? What else is going on there? Is teaching gardening going to be like yet another other-initiated charitable process that won’t take root, because it’s not coming from within, or it’s not meshing with the existing culture?
It just sounds a bit like saying to those on welfare, “Oh, I just had a great idea — why don’t you go get a job?”
Anita Mathias says
Hmm. Do you think hunter-gatherer societies, or societies which have specialized since medieval times have lost the knowledge of growing food. For instance, many people in England are okay with growing flowers, but do not (and probably don’t know how to) grow food.
Perhaps it’s simplistic–or perhaps it’s not been tried. You know, giving people seeds and pots and good soil?
Just an idea… And outside my field of knowledge and experience!! 🙂