I have made a fantastic, amazing, wonderful discovery that will revolutionize the way you garden!

Okay, so, I think it’s pretty clear I’ve gone a little crazy for the miracle that is agriculture in the last couple of weeks.

This is what happens to me, when I’m broke.  I get an idea, and I run with it.

See, I’ve spent most of my life being broke, and by this point I’m getting pretty good at it.  I’ve learned that the most important part is staying busy.  There’s a lot you can do in life to enrich yourself, to improve your position, or even just to stay busy, that doesn’t have to involve money.  Thinking, for example.  Learning, too.

Then there’s the things you do to save what little money you have.  Like bringing the bottles to a redemption center, rather than leaving them out for the recycling truck, or sewing up a torn pair of pants rather than buy new ones, or watching movies on the Internet for free rather than renting them at the video place.  To me, gardening is another one of these things, and even better, because saving money is almost a fringe benefit, and not the main reason for the activity.

But gardening can be expensive, especially when you’re getting started.  You need gardening stuff.  If you’re outside, you’ll probably need compost when you rip up the lawn, but obviously you won’t have your own.  If you’re gardening inside, you’ll need containers, if you’re in a city you might even have to buy soil.  Most of the time, you can figure out ways to get this stuff for free, and that can be another good way to fill up your time.  Restaurants are a good source of containers, and if you don’t have compost, you can probably ask some well-established gardener for a small loan, which you can pay back next year.  You will have to spend at least some money, but consider it an investment: you’ll probably pay yourself back in the first year.

And then there’s seeds.  A full complement of seeds can get pretty pricey, at a couple of bucks a pack.  But here’s the thing, my great discovery, my fantastic revelation:

You don’t have to get your seeds from seed companies.

Instead try the supermarket.  Or, even better, your local food co-op.  Because, as it turns out, a lot of what we eat is seeds, or contains seeds.  Now, you gardeners who’ve been at it for a while are probably laughing at me right now.  Well, that’s fine, it just means that you’ve forgotten your first year, your loss.  For me, this was a thunderous discovery: standing in my kitchen, trying to think of something to cook, my eye fell on a jar of dried beans.  I’d been trying to start some of the leftover seeds we’d bought last spring, and I’d been looking enviously at the Seed Savers Catalog, trying to figure out which of their beautiful heirloom beans I’d plant when spring rolled around again this time.  I realized then that in that jar I probably had enough beans to plant acres, and when I tried starting a few, they all sprouted!

There’s this 32-bean and 8-veggie soup from the North Bay Trading Co. that I like, so I went to the store, and spent $2.50 on a small sample of it.  Nearly every bean sprouted.  I now have around 20 varieties of bean trying to survive the winter in my greenhouse, some heirloom, some familiar favorites, some just plain weird.  Like mung beans.  I don’t even know what those are, but I’ve got them growing.  I’ve played this same cruel trick now on many other seeds and grains, and while not everything sprouts, the beans have now been joined by all sorts of plants wildly inappropriate to the season.  A friend of mine then caught wind of this little project of mine and got inspired, and he spent nearly an hour in the bulk department of our local co-op, taking tiny samples of everything that he thought could conceivably sprout, and came by the house later with nearly forty new varieties of seed, at a cost, when all was said and done, of 66¢.  It’s a remarkable thing, how just like that you can go from being a guy with a few cents in his pocket to the custodian of nearly endless growth, of practically limitless potential…

* My dear friend Will pointed out that he’s written a post on his blog, about much the same thing.  It’s quite good, even.

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Greenhouse Progress Report #1

I’ve got about a dozen little seedlings above the soil, and dozens more (hopefully) developing beneath.  I have, for the time being, halted seed starting, and so my jars sit empty.  I picked up some buckets of sand from the town sandpit today, and raided the garage for things I could use.  I found an old display case perfect for incubating seedlings, old boxes to plant in, some shelves that fit the cracked-paint theme of my old beat-up porch greenhouse.  I also found the perfect little greenhouse table, made all of slats so that soil and water just run right through, and it’s on wheels to boot.

What I still haven’t found is a… one-stop gardening-info shop.  I don’t have any money for new books right now, but I do have my laptop and my Internet connection.  See, I’m writing about gardening here but don’t mistake me for an expert, or even for a person who thinks he knows what he’s doing.  I don’t.  I really have no idea.  I happily admit my ignorance.  And see, that’s a problem: I know so little about gardening that when it comes to learning more I barely know where to start.

I have a good friend, the Herbwife, she seems to know just everything about plants and how to grow them.  It seems very much as though she were simply born with this knowledge, that when the seedpod cracked open, spilling her out into the world, she already knew how to make things grow.  But she’s part of a tradition.  She learned from her parents, and grandparents, and other adults around, and other people.  She’s part of the living fabric of gardening knowledge.

I’m not.

Most of us aren’t, these days.

So I guess it’s gotta be done the hard way.  What else is new?

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Humble, Miracles

In the last week southeastern Vermont has seen both the darkest day of the year, and the first real snowstorm, and I’ve been starting seeds.

I’m writing this right in the middle of said snowstorm, from my greenhouse, the snow blasting against the windows two feet from my face.  For the moment, this is my favorite place in the whole world.  My little green oasis.  My refuge from the storm.

My thoughts have turned to money a lot lately.  I’ve been feeling the crunch over the holidays, even though we decided, as a family, not to do presents this Christmas.  I’ve been unemployed for nearly two months now.  It seems to me equal parts problem and opportunity.  It’s a lesson in humility, and that’s a good thing.  It sure isn’t easy being broke–but I do have the time to spend hours on my trusty laptop researching plants.  That’s a real opportunity.  One of my uncles used to jokingly call unemployment “being on scholarship.”

Herodotus tells us the story of the Lydians, who suffered a famine that lasted for years and years.  They stretched their food by eating only every other day.  On the other day, they played games, to help them forget their hunger.  He puts this to us as the story of gambling’s origin, but there’s other readings and other meanings in the tale; it’s also a story about creativity, and survival, and need, and strength.  This story shows us a way to cope with poverty.  Not with gambling, specifically, but rather by… shifting our activity outside the realm of the purely material.  You get the impression that for the Lydians any actual proceeds from the gambling were quite beyond the point, and that was simply to have something to do to draw attention away from their growling stomachs.  This wasn’t casinos-and-bookies gambling, it was kitchen-table gambling, it was poker for pennies and competitive scrabble.  These were games to play with friends and neighbors.  Ways to pass the time.

But there’s something more, here, I think.  This story hints at how you squeeze blood from stones.  I mean, food would seem to be the most basic of things, right, not just to an individual but to a tribe.  Without food you can’t do anything, right?  But the Lydians did.  They made something, mostly out of nothing, and in so doing not only did they survive, but in the end they were all the richer for it.

Which is why we should grow things, wherever possible.  If you happen to be unemployed, why it’s all the better: you have plenty of time to read and learn and think and work on your garden.  You won’t need to invest much, and I’m sure you could pull something together without spending any money at all.  Do it right and you’ll almost certainly save some money, in the end.  If, like me, you have no background with gardening the learning curve will be pretty steep, but there’s plenty of good ways to get started, and in time learning about plants will become an end in itself, because they’re fascinating.  Soon you’ll be able to coax food from the ground through subtle alchemy and the play of light, soil and water.  You’ll start feeding yourself, with no real intermediaries, becoming more independent.  Maybe you’ll even get the hang of it, and you’ll find that you never actually have to find a job to replace the one you’ve lost.  In any case you’ll soon be able to do something that you weren’t able to do before, you’ll have changed your relationship with unemployment, with poverty, with material want.  You’ll think, bring it on, world: I can squeeze blood from stones.

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