This will be the first in a long string of posts dedicated to growing and maintaining your own food supply, whether it be simple herbs like sweet basil or winter thyme, annuals such as cherry tomatoes, or perennials like asparagus or eggplant. I will not stress here the many benefits from growing your own food, or plants for that matter. It is as fulfilling as it is filling. Gardening is a power, a control that we place over nature's processes and over the years humans have, in vast ignorance, strayed from those natural processes. Just as humans can not live off of multivitamins (which are derived from petroleum but that is for another post) and protein supplements, plants and the earth's soil can not live off of synthetic nutrients (which are also petroleum based). It sounds strange to refer to the soil as living, but in fact in just one tablespoon of healthy topsoil there exists over one million microorganisms. It is these organisms which break down organic matter and nutrients and make them digestible for a plant's roots. And when the plants shed their leaves and fruits they provide food again for these soil organisms. Animals are also part of this cycle, as we serve both the plants and the soil. By eating the fruits of a plant (this refers to vegetables as well) we digest the seeds. These seeds pass through our digestive tract often unharmed and we release them in another location, encased in a ball of nutrients. It is strange to think of our feces as nutrient-dense, but it manure nonetheless. What we are doing here is helping the plant to spread its seed and increase its chances of reproduction and survival. We are also providing the soil with rich nutrients for them to feed off of. Surprisingly enough, fungi are some of the most prevalent organisms in soil, and are a vital part of the nutrient cycle by breaking down nitrogen for plant's to use. Thus a cycle is born with life, survival and dependency ingrained in every step. Soil organisms depend on plants for organic matter and animals for manure; Plants depend on soil organisms for vital nutrients and animals for spreading their seed and/or pollinating them; Animals are dependent on plants for food and thus soil organisms as they give life to plants.
So where does agriculture play in all of this? When we first began domesticating and controlling the growth of plants, we seriously altered this cycle. Methods of permaculture (permanent agriculture), biodynamics, companion planting and every other method you here in the "healthy, sustainable, organic" food movement are simply trying to replicate nature's processes. When this cycle is fully understood, we can more effectively replicate it for our own benefit without altering our ecosystems to a state where we can no longer use them for our survival. Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - as well as more modern Elizabethean and Puritan ways of thinking revolve around the premise that humans are separate from nature. Nature, its plants and animals and bacteria, are all primal and dirty and beneath us. Whether or not you prescribe to that train of though makes no difference to nature, as we still utterly depend on its processes, on its nutrient and chemical cycles from tectonic plates to topsoil to trees to atmosphere to our protective magnetic isosphere. Humans are just as much a part of the food chain and the nutrient cycle as a dust mite, a blue whale or a red oak. You can dismiss this information, or you can look at it as depressing to think that we are no different from bacteria in the dirt or birds in the sky. But we are different, because no other part of this cycle has the ability to realize that it is in fact a part of this cycle. Humans can take a step back, look at their lives, their environment and the world in which they live and understand it. We have the ability to become aware of our place within this world, we can break free from thinking and acting just in line with our place in this cycle and realize the cycle as a whole. If that is not fascinating enough or a sign of the magnificence of humans then i don't know what is. We have only to look around us to find what is most brilliant, beautiful and worthy of our attention. Humans have studied and replicated nature since the dawn of agriculture. Now we use it to understand how to fly, to create hearing aids, to build farms, and to acquire energy from the sources around us. This replication is currently deemed Biomimicry and is a fast growing field in construction of net-zero energy houses, buildings, and cities.
More posts will come providing detailed and helpful instructions on how to specifically grow plants cheaply and efficiently, whether on your windowsill, in your backyard or at your school. But it is of crucial importance before beginning any project to understand the project as a whole. If you go in to growing your own food without any insight as to the natural processes at work, or without understanding your place in the process, then there will inherently be oversights and failures. And you will learn, by trial and error, from those failures. But this need not be the case, as nature and man have provided us with more examples and information then we could gather in a lifetime. When the process and context of growing food is fully acknowledged and understood, the actions springing from that frame of mind will inherently be successful and virtuous if only in the process. This applies naturally to all of life and any future projects. What is it that you are really doing? What is the object and how does it relate to you? And one last word of advice before I wrap this up... The process of any project is equally if not more important than the final product, and as the product is merely an extension of the process, a healthy and fulfilling process based on as much knowledge and insight as can be gathered will lead to a healthy and successful product.
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