Why I Garden

I'll let you in on a secret: I don't actually like gardening that much.

It's not that I actively dislike gardening, exactly. It's just that, given the choice between gardening (planting seeds, hauling trays of starts in and out to harden them off, watering on cold mornings, weeding in the wilting heat of a St. Louis summer, figuring out how to trellis squash) and doing other things (hiking, reading, cooking, drawing, playing an instrument) I would almost always pick the latter rather than the former.

This may come as a surprise to some of you. After all, I murdered both my front and back lawns and have been intensively growing crops instead. I blog about gardening a lot. How could I not like gardening?!

Basically, it boils down to this: 

I don't like gardening that much, but I love having a garden.

I love stepping outside with a bowl and snipping off a fragrant bouquet of herbs, plucking dinner's salad from the earth, and snacking on shoots and berries as I meander around the yard.

I love digging up hundreds of pounds of food and storing it away for the winter.

I love watching birds preening their feathers in my fruit trees, frogs hopping through the cover crops, and native bees and butterflies drifting through the flowers.

I love knowing exactly where the food came from, who grew it, and whose labor brought it to my plate.

I love bringing tomatoes to my neighbors, or using the butternut squash I grew to make a cake to share.

I love sitting in my garden and tuning into the little rhythms of its life, paying attention to the various plants, and learning from them.

I love plucking sun-warmed raspberries straight from the cane every day from summer to the first frost.

I love trying new things and seeing how they'll turn out. 

I love feeling tangibly connected to the Earth, and understanding firsthand how dependent we are on her.

I love that my garden is sending up volunteer plants and seeds that I can share with others, to inspire others to garden as well.

I love the way my garden builds biodiversity and increases the health of the soil.

I love watching the rainwater sink into the garden instead of running off into the street.

I love the intense freshness of homegrown food.

I love that our yard is producing life and sustenance and beauty all at once, rather than simply grass.

I love interacting with nature, and the ways that I become more attuned with the weather, the seasons, the nuances of the soil, the angle of the light, and the communication that my plants are giving me.

I love the feeling of relying just a tiny bit more on myself and my community rather than on a destructive and broken industrial food system.

Especially now, I'm keenly aware of what a privilege it is to have a patch of earth to garden on, and I'm trying to use that privilege to create abundance, resilience, and knowledge-sharing as best as I can. Gardening isn't so much a hobby as it is an expression of my worldview: God gave us a world of abundance and told us to serve it, cultivate it, and learn from it. Gardening is one of the ways I do that.

Gardening is a way to create and celebrate beauty. It's a way to live in community with creation. It's an act of both love and rebellion.

And for that, I'm willing to do the tasks I don't always feel like doing. Gardening can be a pain, but having a garden is totally worth it.

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