The Garden is a Teacher

The garden is a teacher. It’s a classroom and a laboratory. It’s a desk-less schoolhouse primed with opportunities to activate vestigial portions of our kids’ brains— those areas that often remain comatose during that 9am-3pm period on weekdays.

When I was growing up, my family’s acre of suburbia contained a 40 square-foot vegetable garden. Thinking back on it now, this garden was kind of out-of-sync with the rest of the yard— like it had fallen out of the sky onto our lawn and we never bothered moving it. It was an abrupt landscape disrupter (a Ferris wheel would have made more sense in that part of the yard). It was a depressing tan-soiled rectangle— a badlands dotted with a few tomato, pepper, and zucchini plants for two months each year.

This small family vegetable garden promised a solid week and a half of harvesting in August and then would lay dormant like a Halloween-costume retail store for the next 10 months. As a kid, I would sometimes make an unplanned jaunt through the garden on summer days—usually after an errant throw of the football or Frisbee. I didn’t spend more than a minute or two surveying the garden at any one time, though, out of fear my mom would come charging out with a trash bag and sentence me to weed duty.

Like all gardens, mine was a teacher. But she was a teacher in the way Edward Scissorhands is a masseuse. She taught me that we should select a couple of forms of life to cultivate and then snuff out the rest— often by employing an arsenal of Monsanto-sponsored WMDs. I came to believe that a garden was a fastidiously-controlled environment and a perpetual battle. Desired outcomes should be forced—no matter how violent or virulent the means were. It was a chess match with Nature and she was a fierce competitor.

I observed that gardens were graveyards for lady-bugs and earthworms, and they were where predatory wasps and praying mantises unwittingly came to die. These were the unintended casualties of the war on grasshoppers, squash bugs, aphids, slugs, ground ivy, crabgrass, and those other garden terrorists bent on destroying our produce. Each summer day was an episode of CSI: Backyard Vegetable Garden.

In the garden of my youth I learned key values like sterility and homogeneity. If we didn’t value or didn’t understand a certain inhabitant of our garden, that thing was met with hostility or extermination. I developed an horticultural xenophobia.

That garden also taught me that plants required artificial inputs to grow adequately. I learned that they needed a cup of blue juice to grow adequately and that this was a Miracle. I figured soil needed to drink this stuff because it was otherwise impotent. In the case of that garden, I was probably right. I’m pretty sure a discotheque at the local retirement community had more life than a handful of that soil (after all, it looked more like sandstone than coffee grounds and had the friability of a parking lot).

Still, with all the apparent unfavorable conditions of this garden, I learned that this type of garden somehow “worked” in that it produced normal-looking “food” that was sufficiently edible. But, did the end justify the means? That was a question I never learned to ask.

THE HOT NEW TEACHER

I don’t blame my parents for not being into organic gardening, sustainability, permaculture or the like back in the 80’s and 90’s. Outside of a few forward- (or perhaps I should say backward) thinking folk, these things weren’t much on the radar. A utilitarian conventional garden was the norm at that time in America. Aesthetics were secondary. Environmental sensitivity was tertiary, if a consideration at all. Looking back now, as a child of the era of the conventional garden, it is apparent to me that these gardens didn’t offer much in the way of a productive educational experience.

Fast forward a decade or two and you’ll find there’s a new Garden in town. And she looks good.

Organic gardening pioneers like Rodale Institute blazed new inroads into mainstream consciousness and began challenging what normal (or “conventional”) gardening looked like. Organic gardening began blending age-old wisdom derived from ions of food production with green technologies of the modern era. This simultaneous reaching-back and reaching-forward has taken us into the next generation of backyard food production.

What it has also done, I believe, is open up new multi-disciplined classrooms capable of planting invaluable concepts into the fertile minds of our youths. A vast education system right in our backyards. And right at our fingertips (or, in the case of that dark chocolate humus, right behind our fingernails).

In my gardens, class is always in session. Year-round. Here I’ve listed just a few of the lessons I feel my family’s organic gardens is teaching my children (and us big kids, too). With a little creativity and awareness, I believe these concepts are transferrable to other educational arenas and will prepare our little sprouts’ minds for more sophisticated concepts in later years.

Lesson 1: Our organic garden teaches us diplomacy. Do we want Mr. Grasshopper in our garden? Probably not. But like that crazy uncle, we can work with him in a manageable way. He can get some of his without having all of ours. All creatures have their place in the ecosystem and, instead of indiscriminately waging war on anything that poses a threat, we have learned to take some time to carefully research, observe, and strategize— to see if a holistic and diplomatic approach would work better.

Note: other times kids may be exposed to a “just war theory”— that sometimes it may be okay to eradicate a villain (e.g., squash bug) when peaceful coexistence is proving impossible. But we always attempt diplomacy first.

Lesson 2: Our organic garden teaches that there is strength in diversity. The biological melting pot of a garden-done-right is an incredible experience. At any given moment there is a Times Square of biological activity happening in the middle of a garden. On the leaves, on the flowers, on the stems. And that “quiet” subterranean zone…not so quiet. There’s a kindergarteners-at-recess kind of party happening below the surface. Fortunately, what happens below the surface doesn’t stay below the surface. Roots, in partnership with some underground Fungi Friends, are consistently transferring minerals and water (among other things) from the soil to the stems, leaves, flowers, and fruit of our garden plants. My kids are taught all of that. And they remember some of it.

Lesson 3: Our organic garden teaches us to listen. The music of Brian Eno’s, who some call the father of “ambient” rock music, has been described as unobtrusive for the casual listener, yet rewarding to those who listening closely. This is a perfect description for The Garden Band, as well. The sounds of a garden are unobtrusive in that you could easily veg out or nap on a blanket in the midst of your future food. Yet, there are a thousand songs being played daily if you only take a moment to bend your ear (e.g., listen closely to a flowering squash plant on any given July morning and you’ll hear an orchestra of buzzing bees).

Lesson 4: Our organic garden teaches us the art of careful observation. Can one see the biodiversity of a Brazilian rain forest from an airplane window? Can one fully experience the Metropolitan Museum of Art by browsing their website? Neither can we see the vast array of life and the complex machinery of a garden system by casually strolling through the garden a couple times a week. There is much to learn by routinely getting a rabbit’s-eye view of your garden. A biblical proverb gives this instruction: “Take a lesson from the ants… learn from their ways and become wise!” I think this wise counsel can be applied to a number of other garden participants. The collaborations and processes by which this whole thing works are truly inspiring.

We also need to see what’s going on each day in the garden to ensure she is reaching her potential. With our eyes we can often spot a superficial sign of a deeper problem. We can make a sound diagnosis and treat the root cause before the problem gets out of hand. The leaves of a plant often communicate the health of the plant if we take the time to look. Sometimes the presence or overabundance of a particular organism signals an unbalance in the garden. We learn these things by careful observation.

Lesson 5: Our organic garden teaches respect for tradition and for those that came before us. We celebrate heirloom varieties at our house. The seeds tell stories of ancient people— Native Americans and settlers and former presidents and sweat-equity farmers of yore. Our kids carry around heirloom seeds, like the great Chapalote maize kernels, with a sense of pride and wonder. We tell them stories of how things were done in the past and history has never tasted so good. We’re not afraid of technology around our house, but in the garden we rely heavily on the wisdom of our forefathers and good old-fashioned intuition.

Lesson 6: Our organic garden teaches patience and perseverance. What more critical lesson needs to be learned by the instant-gratification and instant-access kids of today (let’s call them Generation Now)? I remember when I planted peas with my son two years ago. The morning after we planted them, he ran to garden with Christmas-morning expectation. Not only did he find no pea pods, he found no seedlings. Nothing but dirt. This was the garden’s Lesson 1 of many on patience. Each of the next 3 morning he raced to the garden to find only brown. No green. He was wrecked. His bubble was riddled with javelin holes. All that work for nothing, he must’ve thought. Soon enough, he stopped racing out to the garden and returned to activities promising instant reward (like making toast). However, on Day 12, I called my boy out to the garden, cautiously awaiting his reaction. Because there they were. One inch pea plants. Instantly his hope was renewed! He started racing out to the garden again each morning. He took note of the new growth each day, the funky tendrils and the pretty flowers. He wasn’t just waiting around for the peas now; there was another truth at work in his spongy little mind. The Lesson on Patience begat the Virtue of the Journey. From seed to feed, there was something to see and do at each step along the way. With this kind of A-Z education available in our backyards, who would settle for canned Z’s from the store? And I learned an important lesson myself, as facilitator of the Lesson on Patience: kids will get excited about vegetables if you invite them into the classroom and laboratory of the garden.

I’ll leave you with those six lessons. There are many more, no doubt— such as making thoughtful plans before beginning a journey (and to have a Plan B, C and D), making creative plans (gone are the days of one red tomato and one green pepper; hello striped tomatoes, yellow peppers, white eggplants, purple potatoes….), and keen organism identification (my kids can spot and differentiate countless species).

In our home we try not to miss an opportunity to teach and to learn. When it comes to hands-on learning there is a garden of possibilities. There are many more lessons yet to be learned, of course. Speaking of that, I have to go; my kids are ready for school (armed today with a hoe, magnifying glass, specimen jar, camera, and sketch pad).