Becoming Tenders

Something is happening out there on these two acres of ours. It looks simple enough, those patches of deep green beans, tomatoes and strawberries that are happily, slowly giving of their fruit day-by-day, Kazakh melons spreading their flowering tendrils, sweet potatoes and squash standing resolute on the 95 degree days, and cowpeas shooting towards the searing July sun as they prepare to flower.

Yes, it looks simple enough, but, as usual, the journey to that something has been complicated.

Part of it is the rain we’ve had this spring, part of it is the catching of the rain via passive irrigation techniques. Part of it is the woodchip mulch we’ve been using, part of it is the fertigating with manure and urine that we learned about from Gardening When It Counts.

Part of it seems to be the type of crops that are growing (calorie crops via The Resilient Gardener) and part of it seems to be the varieties of those crops we are trying (shorter season via Growing Food In a Hotter Drier Land). Part of it is crop spacing (Gardening When It Counts) and part of it is always increasing diversity that thrives in your specific geography (Sowing Seeds in the Desert).

It’s cumulative, you see.

Stewart goes out one morning to build a pallet trellis for boysenberries or climbing beans. I start sweet potato slips after I’ve got my dishes done; a month later we’ve got 1-2 dozen slips for planting. He picks up a few more perennial herbs when he’s in town and I take the boys out to plant beans when it looks like rain is coming. The boys operate as perennial weeders. He’s out making a nettles fertilizer when I announce breakfast, so I thin the okra while we chat.

I think it was Elliot Coleman in The New Organic Grower who talked about these “one percenters”. A little tending here, a few changes in methods there, and suddenly things are moving in the right direction. All of these little bits of shading and soil improvement and just old fashioned paying attention – the ones that take just an hour or two of your time every day – have become a part of everyday life around here. And they are adding up.

To be clear, we’re not exactly starting a farmer’s market here, or even eating much more than bits and bobs from the garden these days for that matter. But we are encouraged… and grateful.

Remember that year we completely failed at homesteading? I had such high hopes then… hopes of big gardens and living off the land and seeing all of these seeds become the fabric for which we build our meals, our days, and our children’s memories. But I wonder now… what was that hope in?

Then, we were homesteaders. Now, we are tenders.

Tending not because you deserve a crop for all of your hard work, but because it is your job is an incredibly freeing paradigm shift. I no longer think in terms of we need x, so we must perform y. Instead, there is an increasing fluidity about this process of homesteading. Just keep planting. Just keep amending. Just keep working. Just keep tending.

Whatever comes of it, it’s all His anyway. We just happen to be benefiting greatly from the process.