By Laureen Fagan
So it was time for New Year’s
Resolutions, and I’m not really a person who does those. The resolution thing
usually feels like “artificial time” to me instead of living and embracing
life, making adjustments and changes in real time as we grow, and sharing new
experiences along with our collective wisdom.
Your physical body is doing this all
the time through a process called homeostasis – endlessly making even the
tiniest of chemical or spatial adjustments to maintain its internal balance,
and I like to think our minds do too. Our garden plants are a lot like us in
that respect: adjusting to temperature and moisture, asking for more nutrients,
“knowing” when it’s time to go dormant or stretch for more light.
So out of respect for the plants’
wisdom and not necessarily my own, I grudgingly decided to make a few gardening
resolutions on their future behalf. Here’s one thing I promise to do better in
the new season:
Keep a garden diary
Well, no, I never have. And that’s
because I always think that I’ll just remember. Sure, I diligently consult the
planting calendar, and carefully plan my garden – in fact, I’m already
sketching out this year’s, because it’s January and only a matter of weeks
until we start planting seeds indoors and go to our coldframes.
But ask me about garden diary
entries and you might get some laughable answers. "Oh, that was the
cabbage planted in March when Wendell stopped by. Maybe."
Maybe what? Maybe it was
cabbage? Or maybe it was March? Come to think of it, maybe it was Wendell?
If you’ve ever done this too, then
you know how amusing the conversations can become as you try to identify really
young plants from the same family, or if March was really April, or if these
were actually cabbage planted in any sort of intentional sense or just plants
that overwintered in a mild year.
The other thing is, not keeping a
diary never really seems like a problem. It’s not like you forgot to water the
beans and you were too lazy to harvest the cucumbers. It’s not the kind of
trellis faux pas that you think will trash the tomatoes, or a squash tragedy
that’s anything like what those unforgiving insects do.
But I’ve come to believe that not
keeping notes is just as bad for those squash. Maybe worse, especially as you
garden year after year.
Crop rotation means you have to
remember. Any fertilization means you have to remember: how much, where and
when. Most of all, maximizing your harvest – and growing as much healthy, local
Unity food as possible in your space – means you have to remember because so
many other decisions rest on that.
How many days to germinate? Is this
yield what you hoped? What good companion choices do you have? How long have
those tiny green bugs been on the tomato leaf undersides? Did picking them off
work?
We don’t write down every time a cup
of coffee rearranges our body and its chemical responses. And we don’t write
down every memory that shapes us, mostly because we don’t even remember every
memory and frankly, our friends and families are plenty OK with that.
But we do stop sometimes to think
about who we are and who we think we are, where we’ve been and where we’re
going. And the turn of the year is a nice time to be reminded that perhaps our
seeds and soils might benefit from a little more of that mindfulness too. A
diary is one way I hope to do better in 2013.
By the way? Those were cabbage. It
was a warm March. And I’m absolutely, positively sure that it was Wendell.
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