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How to Garden with God at your Side

Plot twist: God's always by your side

By Miles Rafael Bairley-UjuetaPublished 4 years ago 9 min read
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A garden is not a toy, or a prized possession. Not a beautiful cabinet or a well fashioned chair; not a fine pair of shoes to be worn and then discarded or a Japanese car to be polished and flexed. A garden is a living being; a colony of beings; each interlaced and interlocked amidst the other. It is a bastion of life against the frigid cold and the lifeless violence of the outside. A sheltered nursery of evolution and a refuge from the harsh trauma of collective life.

Love your garden. Do not snip away its limbs when they look funny or prune away its eyes when they displease you, honor them as you would honor a god; honor them as if the judicious face of the divine was watching your every move. Each and every being which surrounds you from the microbes in your stomach, the parasites in your intestines, the flowers dripping from your patio to the rats burrowing beneath your foundation is a product of creation’s inexorable engine, pulling life ceaselessly farther from the jaws of extinction and the cool caress of final death. So honor these living beings that envelop and beset you as you should love the skin which grows from your hands.

Within each plant that grows and flowers, every stem that writhes and riggles in the wind, and every root which pushes stubbornly into the earth there resides a deity; a spirit which deserves your respect just as much as the idols your ancestors bowed their heads before in temples. When you honor your garden as a friend you see that it will honor you in the same breath. Its flowers lighten the darkness of your sorrow, its fruits soothe the palate of your esse, its juices pierce the membranes of your weary mind and lead your thoughts through jungles they never mused to cross before. Bend your knees before flora’s fluorescent pantheon and you shall be rewarded. A garden can become like another limb, or more aptly another organ. If you divert a small portion of your resources to cultivate a forest within your den the rewards are exponential and insurmountable. This was a revelation which our ancestors unearthed over tens of thousands of years ago, and yet for some reason in the modern day; industry, consumerism, and individuality have attempted to pry it from our hands. Imagine if by syphoning excess blood and oxygen to your hand you could feed yourself. That is in essence is the function of a garden; an extension of the larger body. The brilliance of this evolutionary adaptation is not difficult to uncover. Rather than foraging for hours through the forest what if you could forage only through your own backyard while collecting a higher yield of resources in the process? This is humanity’s true brilliance, and yet in our societies we pervert our brilliance. Rather than attempting to place the burden of labor on the plants themselves, or on a natural world possessed by near infinite powers of regeneration; in order the reap the largest reward in the quickest period of time we as a species choose time and time again to stunt the growth of our gardens, and attempt to overpower their natural cycles through excessive human labor and grandiose feats of engineering. Any smart economist could mull this through their mind for a long minute and come to the conclusion that it’s a mistake, and yet for some odd reason very few do so. When we examine investments it is easy for us to see that a long term investment which generates the highest rate of passive income with the lowest input of labor is the most intelligent one, and yet when it comes to replicating this relationship with the natural world, our civilizations almost always choose to exploit resources beyond their capacity, eroding their long term potential.

Just because we’ve made this mistake countless times doesn’t mean we need to make it again. At this point you’re probably wondering: How then? I’ve just critiqued countless preexisting systems of agricultural found through Africa, Eurasia, and Oceania; what then is the solution?

Start small, and attempt this experiment in your own backyard. The next time you see a plant you don’t like growing in the back, rather than drafting some able bodied child to cut it down or cursing under your breath and angrily snatching up the clippers yourself, see if there is anything that can be harvested from it. Can its leaves be crushed and mixed with other substances to create food for a dog, cat, or a fish? No, alright then. Does it produce berries or other flowers which might possess ornamental or nutritional value? No, alright then. Do its stems or roots contain any psychoactive properties when dried, boiled, or smoked? No, alright then. Remember that if you checked these three of the list immediately without thinking, you probably could’ve looked harder. But it’s possible that you truly cannot find any use for this bothersome plant in your day to day life and at this point, any further research would require more effort than to simply cut it down. If this is the case, rather than expending unnecessary labor, try to see if you can get a plant to perform the task for you. What do I mean? Think about it like this. Almost every person who engages in farming or gardening is instructed early and often to beware of weeds. These vexing pests are understood as problematic because they undermine the growth of whatever plant they blossom amidst, eventually crowding out its environment and sometimes suffocating a plant perceived as beautiful, or reducing the yield of a valued crop. But the traditional way in which weeds are understood is often very naive. It assumes that a pot, a vegetable trug, or a garden bed are pure, unadulterated environments before these “invasive” weeds arrive. If this was the case, how did they begin growing there in the first place? In actuality, whatever plants a gardener seeds in a particular location are the “invasive” newcomers to that environment, pushed to grow there only by virtue of human intervention. The “weeds” are the naturally occurring plants of that environment, whose seeds reside dormant in the soil, are brought there by wind, or by naturally occurring symbiotic partners such as butterflies, hummingbirds, crickets, earthworms, rats, or salamanders. But there’s nothing wrong with gardening or farming; remember it’s our most brilliant adaptation as a species. Gardening allows us to insert ourselves into that naturally occurring environment, and utilize all of its preexisting symbiosis for our own benefit, like connecting multiple live power chords to a single outlet to generate greater electricity, or diverting several streams to one location to create a fertile pond. By concentrating nature’s fecund brilliance into a series of more controlled, smaller environments we are able to harness the earth’s innate bounty and sustain ourselves from it while expending minimal labor. Every healthy plant has weeds in its soil; hundreds of them, often even thousands, along with myriad species of insects, myriapods, and land-dwelling crustaceans. Fungal growths as well, almost always enrich a garden’s soil, and are followed by in many instances, hundreds of thousands of bacterial varieties which anchor burgeoning new ecosystems. The only time when these other organisms become a problem, is when the natural equilibrium between them and the desired plant is upset. When the scales of balance are tipped against the farmer or botanical enthusiast’s favor. When this occurs, hundreds of unidentifiable weeds sprout up smothering a beloved plant, an ant infestation threatens the comfort of the mammalian inhabitants (us), or a beautiful leaf becomes blighted by unknown mycological growth. It is in these cases that intervention is sometimes necessary, but even so, often these problems can be solved by trying to change soil composition with the release of earthworms, relocating the plant to a different environment, or introducing insects such as ladybugs that reestablish balance within the ecosystem.

So, how can one deal with this bothersome eyesore of a plant whose uses appear naught, and whose very presence threatens a gardener’s peace of mind and efforts to impose a unified aesthetic over the grounds? By exploiting its last and final use, allowing it to be cannibalized by another plant. Any plant can become a weed in the right environment and every continent on earth, particularly the Americas and Australia, are littered with stories of beloved Eurasian and African plants “going native” and usurping the balance of entire pre-established ecosystems. This is the power of evolution, the literal miracle of natural competition and survival of the fittest which Darwin spoke so fondly about. When we harness the power of this natural process on the micro-scale, the effects can be astronomical and beyond satisfying. Start by finding a fast growing plant, well adapted to your personal environment, which you can actually find a use for. Perhaps a healthy clipping of a tomato, an aggressive already sprouted potato, a beautiful flowering vine like a morning glory, or a juvenile marijuana plant. Inter this preferred plant into the soil, pot, or vegetable trug you’re working with, a few inches removed from the bothersome weed you hope to usurp. Water the new plant every day, while withholding water from the more irritant side of your botanic microcosm. In time, if this plant is in fact well adapted to your natural environment, not only will its growth outpace that of the other plant, it will be healthier because of it. The other plant has already been able to find success in your small patch of soil because a healthy ecosystem with millions of bacteria, hundreds of thousands of fungal spores, thousands of insect, myriapod, and worm larvae, as well as regular visits from the neighborhood’s daily pollinators have already been established. By simply plugging your new, more valuable plant into this already overflowing electrical current, not only can you rid yourself of a less desirable plant, you can turn what was a problem into a solution with literally exponential potential. Cool right?

It may seem to many that I’ve overthought this, but before you dismiss my methodology and conclusions, remember that this process becomes easier with each new growth in your garden. Every time you increase the population of your domestic forest, the effort required on your part to sustain this collective organism decreases, as it becomes better adapted to its situation, and produces a higher yield with every increasing year because of it. By relying on biological as opposed to manual or chemical solutions, you also tap into the wisdom of the economic concept of diversification. Rather than relying on a singular human action, or a specific chemical product to maintain balance within your ecosystem, you are relying quite literally on thousands of different species, each of which has a vested interest in the continued health of your garden, each of which has tied its survival to the fitness of your living system. Impressed? You should be. This is the subconscious brilliance of agriculture, a practice our subspecies has been perfecting for millennia. But don’t let Monsanto and their slimy agribusiness tentacles convince you to fight against your own interests. Don’t let their cunning convince you against the pragmatism of union with the natural word. Love yourself, love the myriad other organisms that enable your existence, and most importantly; love your garden.

Turn its challenges into strengths, its limitations into opportunities. There is nothing more holy than the flowered divine, nothing more monastic than honoring the varied expressions of the botanical sublime. There is never any need to subtract life, add only, and then reap the rewards of nature’s innate multiplication. I hope you have enjoyed this piece as much as I’ve enjoyed composing it. I pray these words speak to you as they have sung to me.

Move with grace my brothers and sisters, and peace be unto you.

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About the Creator

Miles Rafael Bairley-Ujueta

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