Slowly, I tweak, refining on the chicken coop. Closed in, I made it too hot and dark. Preparing for new chicks—another start, another learning—I block the open floor beneath the roost until large enough to stand on the wire mesh without feet falling through, open to predators that check at night.
In the week we’ve been gone, crabgrass has overtaken much of the garden—that I tended. What I left alone and never planted, watermelons have vines and covered amidst volunteer oats from spring’s planting to enrich the poor clay soil. I make note—nature heals and covers if you let it be; do5 over work it, do it alone and all by hand; let nature help and do its thing.
Some would call it ugly, but they’re the best watermelons I’ve ever grown—our year of rain didn’t hurt.
I make note of our squash. Orange pumpkins volunteered from last year’s Jack-o-lanterns are already set. My squash still struggle, same for the summer squash that came with a name, but the “heirloom” ones are strong and set new ones every day—on barely a month of growth. Once again, maybe nature knows better than man.
How much bounty do we lose trying to standardize a plant that evolves—unique—to optimize every climate?
Our tomatoes are just starting to set. They are filling in the wire baskets. San Marzanos grow on their sides, yet to be staked and setting heavy in our week away.
The bush green beans are lost in the crabgrass, but on back line, the pole beans are setting first crops strong above the earth, and first four feet where deer pick them clean. I don’t mind—we can share, so long as they, like we, aren’t greedy.
My pest pressure will improve when we get more chickens to size to work over the bugs that attack the greens. I watched them work last fall, cleaning a termite and ant infested stump clean until all that rose from the porous wood were clean, their scratching in the winter kill earth picking larva and eggs laid in the soil. I enjoy the process, the learning, far more than spraying with chemicals I’d never want to knowingly eat but know is on all not organically grown in store (meaning indoors, hydroponically, never seeing true sunlight).
I want to learn the older ways, husbandry and not just “science” which I believe to mostly mean—as seen in my everyday work—is a distancing from God and nature’s way and forever dependence on commercial providers.
It’s not sustainable, and as much as society speaks the word—most have no idea what it means.
I believe a day will come when the old ways are all that will save and sustain a “modern” mankind whose lost and forgotten in proper teaching how simple things can be.
K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple Stupid: something I learned as a Grunt and is forever relevant when things get hard and the simplest plan is the least likely to go wrong.
Failing in asethetics, I am learning—slow, and continuous—what was once common knowledge: wisdom retained like the monks of the Middle Ages when mankind went lost and needed returned to the histories it forgot.
Besides—it’s fun.