Having left Buenos Aires a month ago I am quite surprised with how quickly I've settled into the Vermont culture once more. Dinners at 6PM, driving everywhere, silence. Some days I see more turkeys than I do people, but this is what I grew up with so I suppose I'm just a little hardwired for this environment.
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| Getting the newspaper cups ready! |
I've made starter cups out of newspaper. I prefer newspaper cups because, when the plants are ready, you can easily unwrap the cup from around the plant and stick it right in the soil in May. I've started mesclin (lettuce), as it is an early spring crop with a long germination and harvesting time (a little more than two months).
Gardening is a meditative activity. When you first start out the task can seem overwhelming, your mind tells you that the task you're looking to do is too big, there's too much commitment involved, that it's easier to buy the veggies from the supermarket. But soon, if you're dedicated at it, you get to a state of focus, of concentrated energy. The mind calms, until SPLAT! You get hit with a shot of mud. That's my brother Aiden. He doesn't see gardening as meditative. He enjoys the process, the little activities that require hands-on work. He loves the textures and the sensory stuff, the way the earth feels in your hands as you remove it, or turning the soil and getting it ready for planting.
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| Hammering! |
As I work hard, finding inner calm at hammering in the wood barriers around the garden border, he flings mud at me that he's mixed together into a soupy broth in the wheelbarrow. We're an odd gardening duo, and a terribly inefficient one at that, but we get the job done eventually.
Whether you are at work, exercising, gardening, or doing any number of countless hobbies, it's good to remember that the same activity can be accomplished in a myriad number of ways. We all hold opinions about how others perform activities. I think the way my brother gardens is terribly inefficient, but he's also nine years old so I can't hold him to it. I can't force him, or anyone else for that matter, to see my way as the best and truest way of accomplishing the task.
Aiden finds my way of gardening to be boring. We hold to our own ways of doing things, I tell him he can do things more efficiently, but he just shrugs and carries on. I demonstrate to him the effectiveness of my method, but for his own nine-year-old reasons he continues in his own independent way. I can't force him to change his point of view, all I can do is show him that multiple viewpoints exist, and that perhaps another viewpoint is faster, cleaner, more efficient. In the end though he must decide for himself the way he wants to proceed with our shared project, and I must work also to keep our gardening relationship functioning, so come mid-May, little green shoots can start to jump out of the soil.
Cheers,
Kyle
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| An unlikely team |
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