No Safety Net Internet: Put Me To Work!
Or I Don’t Have Green Thumbs But Brown Hands From the Dirt
Some music to set your head for what you are about to read …
A Philosophy of Work?
As you read this and our other articles, you’ll see a concept that we refer to as Severed Conscience, and it is a condition arising from social media addiction. That time spent scrolling and emoting, perhaps even raging, robs you of experiences in life. A balanced life is gifted with thinking, an active nature, and an inquisitive mind. All types of events are the ingredients of your being. There is a continuum to learning, starting with a question, then with knowing something, and if you’re lucky, understanding a subject.
Online life feeds just one component of the vast equation of our experience, and that is, if you’re lucky, knowing. It’s Spring, so we need to get out there, get away from those screens. Gardening is just one way to return to yourself.
I am a transplant. While I live in the Metro Detroit area, I’m not from Michigan originally. Though I was born in Evanston Illinois, my parents moved back to their home in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York when I was 5. I grew up a mountain boy, came out to Michigan when I was 18, and stayed for a job. My mother is a Scottish mountain flower, from a family of 8 and a village that is barely four corners. Berry picking, painting driftwood, predicting the weather are among many of her abilities from a country life that I miss dearly. My mom’s side of the family are makers: they could paint, draw, sing, were great musicians, great carpenters, my grandpa was a master woodworker, and built a creamery. All worked with their hands. That is my “clan” and I’m lucky I have some of those characteristics in some meager ways. Plus when you grow up in that region in poverty you had to be resourceful, there was no entertainment other than what you did for yourself. And you had to hustle. My mom passed that on to us along with a love of a challenge and retaining your independence. Dad did too, in different ways. But if there was someone who would have taught me about gardening it should have been my mom.
But I confess I don’t garden, I am the extra hands to move dirt. But I am not a master gardener.
But for all her roots and habits she possessed from growing up in a remote region during the late 1940s and 50s, we never had a large garden. She tended a small one, tomatoes and cukes were in abundance, but she did not really have a sprawling series of beds. We always have fresh veggies when possible, I remember wanting to get home and she’d pull off at a stand at the side of the road for corn, cauliflower, peas, you name it. Sometimes this would be after filling buckets of wild berries she would pick for hours. I grew up eating farm fresh, and my lovely wife has really carried on that quest with our diet. Mom loved landscaping, and dad built her a greenhouse, but it wasn’t for gardening to a very large degree. Ferns, rhododendrons.
But I confess I really can’t garden. I don’t have the “feel” for it, I have to be told what to do. And by “feel” for it I mean and understanding which comes from failing, and trying again. There is a lot of knowledge, or maybe that’s better expressed as understanding that is needed to have a fruitful yield. I don’t have it, and while I want to acquire it, when given the choice of playing to strengths, I can see why I gravitate to other things. And I don’t have the patience, mostly because I have grass allergies. If I weed I have to pop a Claritin-D first.
But I love to eat fresh vegetables, we seek that out in my family. I even got rid of my dislike of spinach and squash, and fall time pumpkin or squash soup or a steaming spaghetti squash sloshed with butter is one of my favorite dishes. I’m pretty spoiled. But could I raise that myself? Like I said, I don’t garden.
Don’t misinterpret me here - I can be put to work, I love to dig. I love putting in fences, growing up in a family business where we built summer homes, I had to learn to work hard. My dad did me a favor in that I was treated as the lowest on the totem pole compared to his employees - I got the shit work. Dig the post holes. Seal a foundation in 90 degree heat. Run to the lumber yard, but when once back, run to dump, then burn the scrap pile so we would have the open house the next day for the owners. Got stranded on the road because lumber was flying off the back of the truck. I’ve always worked, but I don’t have the mindset for gardening.
But like I said at the start, a mountain boy learned more about gardening in Detroit from a lovely hippie and her husband who grew up in an affluent suburb. When I say learned, I have bits and pieces of what I know and heard, but do I have the understanding to apply on my own? Nope. Put me to work, I can dig and get things set up, but I have to be your drone.
Jan and Karl are 14 years older than my wife and I. We met them shortly after we married, and hit it off. Jan was a people person, and you could say she cultivated her community like she cultivated her garden. We invited them for dinner, and Jan offered - well, I should say she ordered us - to make the salad, she had things from her garden she needed to use. And Jan, an earthy Taurus with long curly hair and a lovely singing voice, while sadly not having kids of her own, was truly a matriarch. When Jan arrived, she moved us out of our own kitchen as she had bags of supplies, we have limited counter space, and the clock was ticking because what I had on the grill was nearly done. Because I had to tend to the grill, I bounced in an out while Jan spread out on every surface we had.
When we sat down to eat, Jan and my wife set the salads, Here was a full plate with spinach, a dark purple leafy I’d later would learn was arugula, cherry tomatoes, candied walnuts, And these orange flowers. Blue cheese dressing.
I picked those off.
“No, you’re supposed to eat them,” Jan chided.
“What are they?”
”Nasturtiums.”
I’m not shy about trying things, and the brilliant orange flower with the blue cheese and everything else beckoned me. So I took a bite. The flavors were out of this world, the flowers had a strong pepper taste, and the arugula was black peppery flavor as well, But all that was offset by the creamy blue cheese and the candied walnuts. I grew up in a farm community, but nothing like this. Maybe spinach but mostly iceberg lettuce and fresh tomatoes, occasional peppers. I didn’t know that that this type of food was even available.
That was our introduction to Jan’s garden. And while my wife was really interested and I did like what Jan’s garden produced, my wife was the one who wanted to know more. Like I said I’m not a green thumb guy. It took a year of Jan and my wife planning meals and canning eggplant and making some killer Eggplant Parmesan to get me to volunteer to help with the planting on the upcoming Memorial weekend.
Karl warned me it was a lot of work, but I, being not too smart and never shying away from helping said “No worries. Put me to work, I don't know how to plant other than put seeds in the ground, but I can dig.”
”You like to dig?”
“I did it for my dad’s business, Sure, I can dig.” Like I said, I’m not that smart and didn’t ask any questions - setting fence posts holes was harder than gardening, it has to be.
What I hadn’t paid attention to was the fact that Jan and Karl used raised beds. Over 20 of them at a length of 30 feet. So Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend I am standing with Karl surveying all that we had cut out for us. Karl is a chemist, a really precise guy. A week prior he turned the soil, and huge rows of dirt sat there, waiting to be moved. But he had the grids laid out with twine, marking where each bed would end up.
”When we toss the dirt make sure we keep it to the level of stakes”. Karl had tied off the twine to the stakes at the height he wanted, a foot above ground. “We’ll go down the rows together to get you started. Before we do, here’s the layout.” Karl had two sheets of graph paper with each row laid out and all the different crops labeled.
This was like construction to me. Tolerances, height requirement, and lots of work to do.
“When do you put in the Miracle Gro?” I was trying to sound like I knew what I was doing.
Karl laughed. ”Miracle Gro? We don’t use that. Fish emulsion. Jan won’t use anything else. One year I did a test, did a small row with Miracle Gro because I didn’t believe her about the fish emulsion - it kicked Miracle Gro’s ass.”
That was my first lesson I learned from Karl and Jan. I thought that, of course, “science and progress” meant that there was a miracle concoction that had to be manufactured. My friends growing up who lived on farms used manure from their Holsteins and supplemented it with other products. That was large scale, but small scale I made the wrong assumption. Later I’d find out that the fish emulsion was as nasty a smell like Karl warned.
So work away we did, and over the course of the day other friends arrived to plan for when they would take their shifts planting. What Karl and I finished, dark chocolate rows of soil a foot high flattened on top like step pyramids, would soon be turned over to the next group.
But I noticed that Karl and I were the only ones with shovels.
We finished nearly 13 rows before stopping that evening. As I said, I can dig, I can work hard. I don’t mind being told how to do things, it’s how I can start to learn. And this was new for me, it was far beyond the single garden my mom had. And the level of detail that Jan and Karl put into the planning was just cool.
For example, I learned that not only did Jan not use commercial fertilizers like Miracle Gro, she used no pesticides. When I looked at Karl’s plans, I saw spots with Marigolds, Chrysanthemums, mint, basil, rosemary, and garlic. And certain plants did better with different combinations of those herbs and flowers.
Now a really wicked thing that sounds so scientific and safe is the term dietamacious earth. Very technical. But once I asked what it was, Karl explained in a cool way. To prevent slugs, you spread dietamacious earth, which is made up of small crush shells. Harmless to us, birds, animals and plants, it is so sharp that when slugs drag themselves across it, the guts are sliced open, pour out, and they die. Become fertilizer in a way when you think about. As a kid growing watching the Mothra / Gozilla kaiju movies, I still picture one of those slug monsters that Mothra fault getting sliced open.
All of these techniques Jan had acquired from all sorts of sources, experiences and fellow gardeners. Some of those people we met that weekend as the planting shifts showed up to trail Karl and my ‘Excavation Services”. I didn’t know what else to call it.
That weekend was a game changer for us. I even planted several beds - I worked my ass off up until Monday, Memorial Day when we finally completed the planting, put up the electric fences, and had a barbecue. I learned many things, and I can say I experienced the prep work for creating these amazing bountiful garden beds, but do I have an understanding? No. Jan had forgotten more things about gardening than I could ever learn from her.
Memorial weekends working at Jan and Karl’s became a tradition for us, and once our kids were mobile enough, they came along and helped throughout the summer. I wish I could tell you that I became a gardener under Jan and Karl’s experienced guidance, but our lack of property exposed to sun and where we were located with a small lot, our efforts were fun, but not to the scale that Jan and Karl achieved. We were home schooling our kids, and while a magic time for us, it was also time where I was forced to work more to support my family on a single income. But as Jan always told everyone, if you put in the time, you get a cut of the yield as things come in. My kids had there hands in chores as part of the down payment.
So I lent my hands and back to Jan and Karl for years. In fact I was always called on for big projects over at their place. As the matriarch, Jan had no problem doling out assignments, site unseen prior to my wife and I having kids. For Karl’s 50th birthday my wife and I showed up to his party early, and there were already 60 people there. Jan calls me into the kitchen.
”I need you to BBQ. When having Cornish Henson, brats, hot dogs and burgers. I don’t want Karl to lift a finger.”
“How many are coming?”
“100.”
That’s how Jan gave out the assignments. You’re there, you’re healthy, and I said “Put me to work.”
It’s an honor to be relied upon that way. I may be exhausted at the end of the day, but I have helped make something, and those times where I just forged ahead without asking the level of involvement I came to an understanding out what working for friends can yield.
