Dew is dripping off tomato vines, plaster is getting smeared on sun soaked walls, and everyone is a little grumpy. Yup. It’s high summer in the ecovillage, and despite rampant sweatyness, itchiness, and brain fog, we are continuing to work together on our collective projects–ideally indoors or between the hours of six and 10 in the morning.
Emeshe here, with a Dancing Rabbit update.
One thing I feel proud of this year is our community garden, which we have started to colloquially call the Down Below Garden because it sits towards the bottom of a long, sloping hill. Its location allows us to use the gray water from the showers, sinks, and washing machine in our common building to water the plants. Gravity draws the water down into a constructed wetland that empties into a vibrant green pond ever-ringed by croaking frogs this time of year. In the spring, an intrepid gardener wades into this pond and siphons the hose so water can flow even further downhill to the garden, hopefully without getting a mouth full of pond slime in the process. This system allows us to reuse water to grow food, which I think is pretty cool. It also means we need to be really careful about what soaps and shampoos we use so we can maintain a balanced ecosystem and not introduce anything we don’t want into the soil.
I’m very much a beginner gardener myself, so it’s incredibly humbling and gratifying to get to learn from the more experienced people around me. Organic gardening takes a lot of care and attention to detail. It also takes knowing the natural environment deeply and being able to shift methods creatively as different years present us with different problems. For example, this year is bringing us a bumper crop of flea beetles which simply delight in consuming the tender leaves of the eggplant. The solution we came up with when the plants were young was a combination of mesh row cover, regular dusting with diatomaceous earth, and giving the plants a morning pat down with tape–a process which made me feel both morose and also quite satisfied. Many flea beetles met a sorry fate by my hand, stuck to our trusty roll of blue duct tape, with a little prayer that they find peace in whatever form they take next.
A community garden isn’t just about tending plants, however. It is in large part about tending and nurturing human relationships. Just as organic gardening takes adaptability, flexibility, and a willingness to roll with the punches, so does organic group organizing. Working with other people requires a solid amount of surrender, particularly if it’s in an anarchic setting where nobody is officially in charge. This method requires good communication, a commitment to show up for your friends, a certain detachment from control, and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to give people a little grace and gratitude even when they planted okra in the bed you were saving for squash.
The degree to which I micromanage and try to push for specific outcomes has definitely decreased since I moved to community. Trying to impose what I think is right on the multifaceted and ever-evolving fabric of group life just tires me out and rarely achieves the best end result. Instead, what I’ve found works for me is an orientation towards listening, engaging with curiosity, and a commitment to process over product. In the garden, and in all things, people’s energy, availability, and inspiration comes in waves and I find that riding those waves gets me a lot farther than trying to swim upstream and force a work party on a day when people are busy, uninspired, or just plain hot.
Overall, this organic method seems to work for our gardening cohort, although it can produce unexpected results. Things are definitely not planted where we said they were going to go on the garden map we crafted in March, but there are abundant potatoes to harvest for lunch, plenty of kale to share, and the promise of almost infinite tomatoes, eggplant, and cucumber on the horizon, so I am happy to keep showing up and letting things unfold.
Emeshe Amade is Co-Executive Director of DR’s nonprofit, the Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture. She is a regular contributing writer for this publication.