What Happens When You Can’t Garden? (part 1)

What happens to our gardens when the gardener can’t tend them?

It was Spring of 2020.  My life was undergoing a total transformation, a shedding of thick old skin affirmed one day by a visit from a 5 foot long black snake that crawled his way into a small gap in the ceiling of my unfinished little cabin to live within my walls.  Everything seemed liminal.  I didn’t even know where I’d be living in a few months.  

The critical moments to start Spring seeds indoors or sow a Spring garden came and went.  I didn’t sow any seeds, and I did nothing for the soil of my 3-year old forest garden – and in that context of a pandemic and the collapse of my life as I knew it, with no garden work on my part, the earth provided for me beyond my greatest hopes.

At a time when I could not garden and had nothing to give the earth but the charcoal and ash from my fire and the fertility in my waste, I ate fresh, mineral-rich, semi-wild food every day of Spring because of what Permaculture taught me.

In the Ruins, a Garden Dream Coming True

It was a dream that had come true for me as I know it has for many others; a dream one of my dearest teachers, Patricia Allison at Earthaven Ecovillage, held and had shared with me:  what if instead of planting and ceaselessly tending vegetables for food every year, we learned to let the wild vitality of the land take care of us?

Four years later, I would have another chance to receive that kind of care from another forest garden. In late 2023, my life underwent another kind of transformation – this time, a much happier one!  Our daughter was born.  

With a newborn, our homestead, and my work, it will come as no surprise that I wasn’t able to worry about the garden!  And yet, we were able to eat free, healthy, fresh food from the land again. The garden and the wild showed up for our new family.

Without lifting a tool or planting a seed, we ate nutrient dense and wild food – the food we’d been fertilizing for years only with the outputs from our own life.  

I am blessed to say that our daughter is already so strong and vital of a little human and that some credit must go to the rare nourishment of those deep-rooted and nutrient dense plants with their perennial and self-seeding wisdom of how to find their way.

The Plants That Gave To Us Without Asking a Thing

On those April and May days of both 2020 and 2024, I made salads and cooked vegetable dishes with the diversity of a hunter-gatherer’s diet.  

I could group the plants we ate into three basic categories:

1. Perennial Vegetables I planted once years before
2. Self-Seeding Annuals I planted or encouraged years before
3. Wild Plants and Volunteers foraged inside or outside the garden

Some of the plants would have been typically thought of by most Americans as too intense (…bitter, medicinal, spicy, and so on…) to eat as a vegetable only by themselves; but when these same strong-flavored and medicinal plants were only one of as many as twenty (!) different plants in a dish, they helped weave a healthy and astoundingly delicious plate that always felt good in our bellies.  

As a Permaculture nerd, it became a game to me to put in as many different plants from as many different families into one plate of cooked or raw greens.  I didn’t write it down, but I think I hit around 25 plants from 10+ families…!  Eating that kind of diversity meant we were taking in a range of minerals and of medicinal qualities that blended together to make our bodies balanced and strong.  When I think about the stress i was undergoing during both of those transformational times, I know that the vitality in those plants carried my body through.

Low Input, High Yield – Gardens for the Uncertain Future

I want to emphasize the lack of water, effort, and any inputs into this system.  In one of those gardens, I’d built soil years before by relying partially on waste-stream inputs, like spent Oyster mushroom straw; and in the other, I pretty much only used what came naturally out of our daily life.  Neither garden had ever been tilled.  Weeds either became food, medicine, or mulch.

When we think about a future that may have far more resource constraints, or about aquifers going dry to irrigate fields of crops, or about top soil loss from over-tilling or nutrient pollution from fertilizer run-off, this wild garden way calls out with an important lesson.

…and, the beauty of eating wild goes beyond any calculation of harm or benefit.  There is something sacred in feeling the Earth rise to meet you and provide for you.  It’s a reversal of the curse of toil so many of us seem to have inherited.  It’s a serious shift in the image I know I carry of the tired farmer, breaking their back to wrestle out rows of vegetables or turning to giant machinery to force the matter.

The Earth can take care of us and we need to experience that.  Two Permaculture friends of mine shared with me a tradition from their Jewish heritage of a seven-year agricultural cycle.  Every seventh year, the call was to let the fields rest and to depend instead on what the land and wild provide of their own will.  It is easy for me to see some of the wisdom in that practice.  For one year, we break the spell of thinking we’re doing it all and fall back on the trust of something greater that is here to take care of us and always will be.

An Aside:  My Friends Think I Hate Kale 

I don’t hate kale; but if I’m being totally honest, my love of the perennial and other self-growing plants has made me mostly lose interest in growing lettuce, spinach, and kale and other brassicas.  I’m especially skeptical about growing them in the hot parts of the Southeast.  Obviously, people do it; and I wonder, for how long and with what inputs?

The Brassicas I know are largely cold season plants that grow better and sweeter with a long cool Spring and a gentle transition to Summer.  My experience of Spring in the Piedmont has been that it keeps getting shorter.  The time between Spring planting and Summer’s swelter that bolts the plants narrows by the day.  

Gardeners and farmers get around this with laborious and sometimes energy-intensive season extension techniques.  A lot of it results in plastic landfill accumulation and tired farmers.

I spent a little time learning from one of the Piedmont’s best small-scale organic gardeners and plant breeders.  He grew amazing food.  When I saw what he had to do to get marketable Spinach to grow in the Piedmont’s abbreviated Spring, I decided I would never bother.  Spinach has a bunch of wild cousins in the same genus that show up on their own and are delicious and good for you.  Sorry, Spinach.  If I were another ten degrees North, it might be different.

Other Traditions Around Spring Vegetables

I also consider what I’ve learned from Natalie Bogwalker and Joe Hollis of Mountain Gardens about Sansai, the Japanese mountain vegetable tradition (and it’s Appalachian variant) of eating a whole lot of plants in Spring that might not be edible later in the year, but that are the earliest and most nutritious delicacies in Spring.  Sansai can break the categories of what plants we think of as edible.  There are so many plants that become tough and unpalatable (or sometimes toxic) by June, but that are as tender as, oh, I don’t know, Smilax tips in Spring.  In the diversity of a Permaculture forest garden, this can mean dozens of plants to eat in Spring without toil or plastic tunnels.  

Some of these veggies also have a specific reputation for detoxification of the thick, stagnant state Southern and Native American herbalism recognize as following a hard Winter.  They work with blood, kidneys, and liver to get things moving again and to bring out our inner Spring Chicken.  

Many of these plants (especially the forest ones) have their own ways to discourage too much herbivory.  Some need to be protected as much as any, but almost nothing is as helpless as the veggies most of us grow.  

The other astounding thing I’ve learned about the herbaceous perennials veggies is that they appear at the very first moment possible.  They know exactly what cold week will be a good one to stick their stems out.  If the patch is big enough, you can eat some of these very first greens as early as February.  To get fresh greens that early from the usual veggies, you’d usually need to use seed starting trays, grow lights, plastic, watering, potting soil, and that’s before the process of hardening plants off and the transplant delay.  By the time the Spring kale gets vigor enough to be eaten, we’ve been eating Stinging Nettles for weeks (unless it’s a kale that overwintered).

Similarly to Perennials’ great sense of timing, self-seeding garden plants (usually known as “weeds”) often know exactly what week to sprout in.  They know where to sprout.  They decide.  Their intelligence is engaged.  We can’t know all that went into their choice to appear in one spot and not another and we don’t have to.   

Expanding Our Narrow Idea of Food

I’ve read that our society relies mostly on about 20 plants out of the 20,000 potential edible ones.  We may not have access to 20,000, but how many already grow around us and how many more would be glad to grow easily without extra labor?

… and if we’re into the extra labor, wouldn’t these plants that choose to grow here or that grow from deep roots be the ideal ones to save the seed of and to try to breed for more resilience and edibility?

… and another thing!… (ahem)… it’s a little odd to me that, in contrast to many of the more wild and perennial foods, most of the vegetables we see for sale are uniquely single-function – meaning they are really just used for food, and not also medicine, habitat, fiber, pollinator plants, and so on.

That isn’t to say I can’t come up with a dozen creative uses for a cabbage (I can) or that there’s nothing medicinal about a collard green (there is); but for the most part, lettuce and others = thing you eat and that’s it. 

The perennials Permaculture has done a lot to popularize as well as the weeds and forest edge plants that just show up are almost all known medicinal plants, and the perennials are also largely habitat for all kinds of helpful critters and many meet human needs beyond dinner time.  This fits with Permaculture’s unique emphasis on each element of the system providing multiple functions. Only in a human-made system does something really just do one thing.

So let’s explore some of these wonder plants that took care of me when I couldn’t garden and that can be here for you in part 2 of this series on wild gardening.