Gardening in the Information Age
Gardening is a beautiful act, giving its participants a taste of the nurturing earth, self-sufficiency, and a sweetness only found in growing your own food. Yet, over the years while talking to gardeners, I’ve been surprised to find many suffering from a vague sense of uneasiness. I’d like to take a step back and consider this from a broader perspective in hopes of illuminating some of the sources of this feeling—both the troubling and the triumphant, the bitter and the sweet—relieving some of this anxiety.
Our Shared Anxiety
I sense a palpable disquietude among many gardeners, and it seems to be growing by the year. It’s sometimes manifested as a subtle troubling, a second-guessing, a persistent internal tug that maybe there’s a better way. Other times, it comes out as a defensiveness or an arming of oneself with as much supposedly impenetrable, infallible knowledge as possible only to face inevitably disappointing results.
We all experience this in some form or another. It’s a product of our age. To not feel it would be to be completely isolated from the world around us. But it’s more keenly felt by some than others.
On the one hand, there are beginning and veteran gardeners who’re trying to figure it all out for themselves and have understandable anxiety from their known lack of information; on the other hand, there are veteran gardeners who’ve learned an immense number of details but who still often suffer from the anxiety that results from a lack of context for these otherwise discrete piece of information.
To Learn on One’s Own
The beginning and veteran gardeners who’re trying to figure it all out for themselves have plenty of passion. They deeply desire to grow their own food. They just haven’t been lucky enough to have wise old green-thumbed gardeners in their lives to teach them in person. Instead, what choice do they have other than to turn to gardening books, websites, blogs, videos, and a few classes here and there?
These sources help, but they can be overwhelming.
First, there are just so many of them. Where does one start? Plus, they often profess such different, even contradictory, methods that even experienced gardeners could be excused for feeling overwhelmed and left second-guessing themselves. How does one know which one is right or best?
Second, many of these sources typically lack the bigger picture needed by any learning gardener. It’s understandable; it’s the nature of their format, typically being short and focusing on a specific topic. But, it leaves many hopeful garden pupils for want of a larger picture they’re not getting.
Third, if only learning from reading or a watching a video, how does one learn the plethora of tiny details that are so small, so ingrained, or so taken for granted that they are often overlooked by writers and the creators of web tutorials? How exactly, for example, does one hold a pot, and precisely how hard does one tap or bang on its bottom as it’s tipped upside-down to remove a seedling for transplanting? And what does one do next when those instructions, if even given, fail and the plant and soil still don’t come out? Following a garden book is often like following a complex and nuanced recipe. You might get it right your first time. But you’re more likely going to need several times of trial and error and second guessing to figuring out exactly what the author means by each step, if you ever do.
To Need All the Answers
The veteran gardeners who’ve learned an immense number of details without being given the larger context of overall garden health often suffer anxiety for similar reasons. They’ve read up diligently on gardening. They’re well versed on the details of plant varieties, pests, and diseases. They peruse the internet and books for the latest on raised-bed formats and no-till methods. Some may even feel obsessed or overwhelmed, searching for the pieces to solve their garden puzzles. Yet, many still struggle to get the results they desire because most sources give this wonderful information without placing it in the overarching context of how to achieve optimum garden health. A perspective that contains this context is the foundation of all great gardening. It teaches the most powerful, simple actions all successful gardeners must take to maximize their gardens’ health.
Knowledge of plant varieties, pests, and diseases without the context of overall garden health is like knowledge of human diseases and treatments without the context of what a truly healthy body looks and feels like and how to achieve it. One must first know what a truly healthy garden looks like and how to achieve it in order to reach optimum garden health and success. These actions are part of an overarching vision of garden health that truly expert gardeners consider the fundamentals. They’re not hard to achieve and not hard to learn. They’re just often ignored by garden writers and web tutorials in favor of more glittery garden knowledge.
Yet, these individual pieces of advice, given without placing them in the overall context of garden health, leave garden pupils inevitably uneasy. Knowing even a panoply of discrete information without the larger context or desired results leads to anxiety. We know intuitively something is missing and wonder what that is and if there’s a better way. We might know what a tomato hornworm and late blight look like, for example, but what we really want to know is how to make our tomatoes as healthy as possible, not just how to fix their problems.
The Source: A Product of Our Time
Seemingly different on the surface, both of these actually come from the same source: lack of the most relevant information passed on by one who really knows. And both would be cured by spending time around a green-thumbed gardener for a season or two, asking tons of questions and emulating every thing they do until you were ready to experiment on your own. In that time, you would learn all the fundamentals—and the tiny, yet important details—that you need. In fact, the fundamentals would become so ingrained and intuitive as to be largely taken for granted. Where the garden is positioned, for example, is of utmost importance but would be taken for granted after a few years of planting in the same spot. All of us would learn an astounding medley of tips, tricks, and complete paradigm shifts from such a gardener, even us supposed experts. There’s just so much one learns over decades of gardening and so much wisdom that has been passed through the ages. If only we all could have such a person….
In many ways, this situation is a product of our time—being simultaneously physically disconnected from daily family connections and traditions while also being inundated with information (We live in a post-modern world, the information age, and our lives entail unique experiences because of it. I almost titled this book, website, and blog Post-Modern Gardening for that reason.). If our parents weren’t interested in gardening, most of us didn’t have a grandparent, aunt, or uncle living near enough to fill the gap, letting one generation break the cycle of ancient, passed-down knowledge.
In truth, we may not have listened anyway. The youth culture that we are, often thinking older people are “out of touch” and too rooted in “outdated” ways, we increasingly turn to books or the internet for our information instead, eschewing the passed-down knowledge and skills of our own family members, especially during our teen years when we likely could have gained the most from their gardening wisdom.
It’s sad in ways, but there’s also some truth in that approach.
If you stepped into a garden in 1950, it would very likely look a particular, predictable way—a tilled garden with individual rows spaced a comfortable walking-path distance apart. It’s true: parts of that garden are outmoded. We simply know why not do some of those things now, in part because of greater access to information.
Still, although an anachronism rooted in its time, that garden also contains thousands of years of accumulated cultural wisdom not to be summarily discarded. What is to be kept and what is to be discarded, then? That decision is part of our problem. We know enough to not just accept and repeat previous patterns but find ourselves lost when discarding the whole package. We need another solution.
The Fabric of Our Lives
This conundrum is not unique to gardening. It’s a product of our time and has become part of the fabric of our lives.
Living in the midst of a torrent of “new” information and options, we often find ourselves overwhelmed by our array of alternatives. We are inundated with information—yet, often ill-informed—and often feel pressured by our disorienting array of choices. For example, it’s common for us to lie awake at night pondering all of our possible future paths, wondering which one we should choose, which one will be the best. And we are, likewise, haunted by the ghosts of the selves we never lived, those specters of the imagined lives we could have experienced had we just chosen a different path. Both of these are the continual “what ifs” that roll through our heads while lying awake at night.
If we’d lived in a village in 1500, we wouldn’t have had these issues. We would have had one path for our life’s work—likely a farmer—and all of the tasks of our life would have been clearly taught to us starting at the youngest of ages. Plus, there were probably only five people near enough our age to marry in our village, making “what ifs” for relationships almost impossible. Choices weren’t our trouble. Accepting life’s path may have been. In modern life, however, the seemingly infinite array of choices can leave us wondering, hesitant, trepidatious, and left second-guessing about every serious part of our lives.
This is why, even though we have so much access to information, we can find ourselves feeling unsure of ourselves or our next choice. We largely have to forge our own paths, creating our own version of living as we go along. We live our daily lives disconnected from passed-down traditions—sadly from those wise and noble, like gardening, and thankfully from those less so— and from those who’d pass them down and be there to answer our questions as they arise.
Much of this is beautiful.
But much of it is also at least a little troubling, overwhelming, and can make us at least a little uneasy.
And our gardens are no different, leaving us with a sense of unease no matter what choices we make. So many of us wonder, “Am I making the right choices?” “Should I be doing THAT instead?” or “I thought I knew gardening, but I feel overwhelmed by all the different methods.” This unease, in an activity like gardening that should bring calm, peace, and connection, is unnecessary. I hope to offer solutions to this in the following pages, starting with a different perspective.
A Different Perspective
This age of information can be overwhelming, but it’s also a wonderful time to be alive for three reasons.
First, gardening for us is a wonderful, safe experiment. Even if we’re using it to provide all the food for our families—which, honestly, no matter how much we might want to be, most of us just aren’t—we have other options if our experiments fail. Gardening, for us, offers a time during which we can try something new each year, learn from it, and get excited about the adjustments we’ll make for next year. It’s a chance for those of us with nurturing souls to put ourselves into a partnership with plants and the actual earth, doing our best to help them both grow healthier and stronger, and, then, to literally see the fruits of our labors as they feed us. And it’s incredibly rewarding to see our actions have positive results, to know any bit we’ve done is one step closer to being self-sufficient and making a healthier world. Plus, that meal, made with all, or almost all, of the ingredients we grew ourselves, is often the best meal of the year. Just as hunger is the best sauce, good work, making you part of literal positive growth and self-sufficiency, is the best ingredient.
Second, even if we don’t have them in our family, we have access to great gardeners to provide a blueprint for our efforts. They are our models for dealing with the overwhelming array of information. And, because we live in this age of information, it’s one we can access even without spending two growing seasons with one of them—no matter how splendid that would still be.
Finally, living in amongst this array of information, we have access to new ideas, perspectives, concepts, methods, and possible solutions to a degree far beyond that of any of our ancestors. We can learn about everything thing from the sloped, sunken garden beds used by some Native folks in arid regions to traditional Hidatsa three-sisters layouts, from old-school European methods to more recent French intensive and Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic methods, from today’s re-emergence of double-digging to several no-till methods. In short, we have access to information that would have made our more curious ancestors fitful with jealousy. And as long as we root all of it first in the basic truths of what’s most important for our garden plants—the fundamentals—we can find amazing growth in our gardens and in our lives as gardeners.
