This is my third year planting vegetables and flowers in a 10’ x 24’ plot inside a community garden with another 41 plots. Before 2022, I had never planted vegetables nor had much of an outdoor garden. I was more of a houseplant person. Last May I wrote an essay called Gut Gardening in which I explain my approach to growing:
However, my most exciting partnership is with Nature itself. Yep, that’s another Something Greater to which I am, and we all can be, connected. In fact, I have been following Machaelle Wright’s Gut Gardening concept, which provides insights and mechanisms for me to co-create with Nature’s Intelligence. Yep, that’s me connected to something greater than myself.
Wright created and runs the Perelandra Center for Nature Research. Her work is wonderful, powerful and effective. She learned by trial and error following the guidelines set out at Findhorn in Scotland. She has written several books and sells wonderful products filled with the energy and essence of the plants grown in the Perelandra garden. She calls this first stage working with Nature Intelligence, Gut Gardening, because we listen to our gut to find our way.
Yep! Very airy-fairy! However, Perelandra, Findhorn, ancient civilizations and many inspired gardeners today know what can be done when we allow Nature to lead the way. In my experience, it is true beyond dispute that a co-creative, respectful, listening relationship with Nature – yep, Nature with a capital N – yep, a Something Greater than myself, yourself, ourselves, and the materialistic considerations of this time and place – is exponentially more effective and powerful than either party on its own.
This year, I got in the garden early to mark off my plot and make sure everything was in order. However, I didn’t start planting until late May. When I walked into the garden on May 24, I was struck by the number of steel stakes and fencing inside and around the individual plots. Sure, we need stakes and trellises to support climbing plants but we’re talking tall rebar poles here.
Looking around, I felt as if I was in a Mad Max dystopian world where people were fighting for their space and protecting their food from threat. Sounds extreme but it was a visceral reaction. My gentle, old-fashioned community garden was gone; replaced by steel, metal fences and all manner of gadgets to protect the plants from hail, wind and bugs.
Most of the devices and techniques in the plots are proven and used often by many gardeners. However, it was such a change from the past two years that I wondered if these protections were a reaction to an external world that feels threatening and uncertain. As if my fellow gardeners were thinking: “I have to get this growing right so I have the food I need.”
There is also always a sense of competition amongst the gardeners even though there is no contest or reward to production. I have to say that today when I walked through and saw how much lettuce, beets and onions other plots are producing, I was a tad envious. They started earlier than I and used seedlings instead of growing from seeds as I did. Next year I will follow their example. I keep learning, and it is exciting.
When I look at the stakes, fences, netting, containers and different coverings, it seems a perfect example of people trying to control Nature instead of working with it. When Machaelle Wright describes her first attempts at creating a beautiful vegetable and flower garden, she explains that she listened to other people. She followed established procedures including the use of chemical pesticides. But eventually, she gave up control and worked with Nature’s Intelligence.
I am doing this in my garden as best I can. In the May 2023 essay, I shared that I was often guilty of telling Nature what to do or not listening for any guidance at all. The behavior persists this year, but I am listening more and feeling a bit confident in my choices. We’ll see how that works out in August and September when the harvest comes in.
My commitment to Gut Gardening and a co-creative partnership with Nature is supported and encouraged by listening to many young farmers, homesteaders and gardeners who are learning and demonstrating the power of working with the flow and intelligence of Nature. For example, I recently heard Gavin Mounsey, who explains that he is “currently enrolled in a lifetime apprenticeship to nature.” Gavin talked about how he uses regenerative practices to grow food in his backyard; enough, he says, for his family to be self-sufficient if required.
My fellow community gardeners are doing what Western society has taught and practiced for decades, i.e., controlling Nature is required to live and succeed. Man is superior to all and we must exert the force required to pull all of life in line with our needs and intentions. If we apply enough metal, chemicals and protection, we can beat the natural world down. Unfortunately, we have been very successful at this. So much so that we are in danger of losing the soil we need to grow the food to feed ourselves.
Yes, weather is unpredictable, especially in our region, and hail can destroy much. Yes, there are bugs and rabbits - which did eat a few of my bean plants. You take that into account and work around it. I planted more bean seeds and will remember to close the gates better. You have coverings for hail. You encourage beneficial insects to eat the harmful ones. You set aside or expect to lose some on your produce to rabbits and bugs – within reason. As you let the plants find their strength to withstand on their own, the subsequent harvests are richer.
In the long run, humans will lose to Nature if we don’t join forces. We are at a point where we must learn to co-create – to cooperate. Balance is required in order to move forward with life-affirming and life-supporting progress. We can incorporate our technology, expanded scientific knowledge, and the power of our intuition to be still and listen to what our garden, our food, our landscape, our animals, and all that lives are telling us is the right next step.
From this place with an intention of choosing and creating the highest good for all life everywhere, we will learn, discover, invent, create, develop and bring into form strong new systems for living. We will each contribute life to Life and will stop being part of a society that destroys and sullies more than it needs and protects.
This is what I believe:
“Nature is powerful beyond belief and humans are powerful beyond belief. But when nature and humans act together, that combined power is intensified a hundredfold.”
The Perelandra Garden Workbook by Machaelle Wright
Trust the partnership and enjoy the summer.