This week’s guest columnist is Sue Ellen Norris.
Author’s note: Tony Norris is off tracking a song in the Blue River wilderness about the Crooked Trail to Holbrook, so Sue Ellen Norris is keeping the Home fires burning. Sue is a master gardener and works with the Youth Garden Project for Flagstaff Foodlink. She tills the cinder soil at the foot of Old Caves Crater in Doney Park.
I harvested 15 tomatoes today, representing six varieties and ranging from 14-ounce brownish beauties to teardrop pastes. I carefully nestled them in their cardboard cradles to continue ripening, and gifted a friend with the most luscious specimen. Then, after careful research on the tomato aficionado blogs, I sweated in the sun, “topping” the plants to remove blossoms that have no chance of producing a full-grown tomato in our short mountain season. I stood amazed as the clouds, which I thought were tucked safely behind the Peaks, suddenly rose, and let loose torrents of rain on our Doney Park piece of paradise—thankful that our catchment system is finally in place, but fretful that the dampness would open the newly pruned plants to some awful fungus or wilt.
I have loved homegrown tomatoes since my years as a hippie homesteader in Maryland and West Virginia. I love to comb the catalogs and Web pages for heirloom varieties that might prosper here. I start the little seeds in March in a tray under a grow light on my clothes dryer, and move them to my sunroom window after the first transplant. I lovingly add the worm castings from the little black box in my cellar. I spray the foliage with Nitrozime, and plant them by a method that is a mixture of 42 years of experience and hillbilly superstition. They are bedded in a layer of compost and bone meal, topped with red plastic which warms the soil and is reputed to promote prolific blooming, and are surrounded by those miraculous walls-o-water which will thwart the May freezes and June frosts. Then I wait, along with everyone on the Colorado Plateau, for the ferocious winds to abate and the kachinas to bring rain to our mountain, and hopefully our little plots.
Why do we garden? It is an activity fraught with challenges and frustrations. It is tedious and often backbreaking work to prepare the soil, plant, weed, harvest, preserve and cook. Yet, we persist just for the joy of partaking in the miracle.
The book of Genesis recounts that God’s first act on earth was to plant a garden. And we know He ain’t no dummy. We know from archeologists that agriculture birthed civilization. But what we do not know, if we do not partake, is the smell of the humus in spring, the gut recognition that today I can plant, the doubt and then joy of pressing those tiny crucibles of life into the darkness and seeing them emerge into the light, and the bliss of the first monsoon rain after weeks of mind-numbing, moisture-sucking wind. Admittedly, we would be spared the crushing disappointment when the aphids by the millions engulf our broccoli or a fungus melts the squash, but we would not know the delight of seeing the chickens decimate the new crop of grasshoppers, and the triumph of ending three years of tomato wilt by inoculating the soil with mycorrhizae. And, we would miss the morning meanderings where it is green and moist and silent. And we would miss the food that tastes like the earth, is rich in nutrients, and did not come to us through “better living through chemistry,” exploited migrants, and miles of petroleum and exhaust.
We have answered the question of why we garden as we sit down to a meal of freshly harvested food with friends and a good bottle of wine as the sun sets over the Peaks. We are satisfied because our hard work and worry and frustration and joy have won the day. We have helped create the food that we eat, in the place where we live, in soil we have lovingly fed with our waste, pollinated by insects that inhabit and balance our ecosystem and picked at the peak of perfection. We have felt the seasons progress in our bones, have worked and rested, planted and pruned in harmony with the sun and moon and all gardeners that preceded us.
I’d like to see my grandkids pause long enough from Angry Birds to catch the vision and chase the ravens from the corn. Survival could depend on it.