The Unrealized Radicalness of a Home Garden

by Elizabeth Keokosky
Ithaca Meeting

Abridged from a larger article available at www.tompkinsweekly.com/category/opinions-columns/sustainable-tompkins/

The common reasons for home gardens are clear enough: fresh vegetables, saving money, being outdoors. But after decades of gardening, I am just now seeing the radicalness of a home garden.

My garden has become a portal to a new ecosystem, a microbiome. Growing knowledge of microbiomes has changed what we consider an individual. Each human has a community of microbes in our body; every garden includes a community of microbes in the soil, as well as the more visible plants we see above ground. Seeing microbiomes as “collective individuals” gives us a more radical, many-layered understanding of the complex challenges and solutions worked out in nature.

I had been treating plants as individuals, but now see them as part of a community. In a miracle of chemical communication, a network of fungi and helper bacteria trade nutrient needs with plant roots, transmit pathogen defense warnings to other plants, etc. The process is remarkably similar to the way that microbes in our human guts talk with our immune systems.

I used to feed my plants; now I feed the trillions of microbes who live in the soil underlying them. I propagate more of these microbes in my compost pile, and compost tea is a fermented probiotic for plants, similar to yogurt for the human gut.

Social Darwinism, an unscientific distortion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, has been used to justify the intense competitiveness of the industrial revolution since the late 1800s: seeing each individual as competing against all others in a marketplace. But the radicalness of a small home garden as a community of cooperating beings turns competitive industrial culture on its head.

We home gardeners are not market driven; we are producers as well as consumers of food. The rewards are in the deliciousness of food grown yourself. A home garden is a pantry where food is always fresh, transportation costs are negligible, and there are no plastic wrappers.

Home gardeners don’t have to make a monetary profit, but there are many cost-saving alternatives to buying plants or garden supplies. Instead of fertilizers and herbicides, I now lug whatever biomass waste I can lay my hands on to my garden. You can make your own potting soil, apply amendments sparingly and at the right time, plant perennials and self-sowing annuals and save seeds from other annuals.

Frugality also drives inventiveness, such as using limbs and vines for support structures and cutting weeds or grass from your own land to mulch plants. The longer you garden, the more you find you can make do with what is around you (hardly a capitalist mantra).

Abundance happens in a garden.  Gardens are not based on scarcity the way capitalistic markets are. They naturally foster sharing and neighborliness, trading plants, surplus produce, gardening tips and tools.

Reading books such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (you can read an excerpt on this page), I am beginning to understand one more radical aspect of gardening, the most important of all: the reciprocity between people and plants. Many indigenous cultures teach gratitude for the gifts nature has given them. They never take more than the Earth can continue to provide, implicitly acknowledging the needs of future generations of all species.

Many people who have grown up in an industrialized culture are only now, when so many species and ecosystems are endangered, beginning to realize our dependency on Earth’s gifts. Our new understanding of microbiomes as part of symbiotic ecosystems provides a model for community on societal and global levels at a time when overlapping crises amplify the need for cooperation. Radically loving, reciprocal relationships are the essential piece needed to reverse a self-destructive worldview that takes and takes until the abundance and beauty of Earth is used up.

Giving back more than you take out has a name: regeneration. Regenerative practices are spiritually based in gratitude for Earth’s gifts and the understanding that it is our responsibility to put back more than we take. Rebuilding the health of soil, of ecosystems, of human communities, and of the planet is a fantastically optimistic practice.