I’d rather not be in the wilderness

Personally, I am not a wilderness person. I am scared of the big country, can’t hike because of age and inclination, and don’t want to shoot a moose or bear. I like to see them move through our fields, forest and fen when they are not causing problems for the garden or chicken coop.

I like gardening, raising a few Dexter cattle in rotationally grazed pastures and getting my hay from our lessee (except occasionally when we make a haystack just to remind ourselves of the olden times). I enjoy our conservation easement (about 80 acres of wetland) even though I cannot walk through it most of the time.

Garden joys

But perhaps most of all, I enjoy having as much garden as I can handle and then some more, even when it means hiring student helpers or neighbourhood children. I enjoy having my own manure supply to compost or spread directly. I enjoy trying out new crops on a tiny scale in our Experimental Garden – crops like industrial hemp, phacelia, fenugreek, two-year-old fall rye plots, hull-less oats, fava beans and new “forage cocktails.”

I love having the room to plant clumps of plants (instead of long, perfectly straight rows) throughout the garden, a crazy quilt of usefulness and “just beauty.” I like sharing food that I don’t like to eat but love to give away. And when our relatively short growing season is done, I like leaving some plants standing: hemp, sunflowers, flower stalks, currants and haskaps. These are for the birds in winter and to break the white expanse of a snow-covered garden.

For life

I try my best to live in my garden, on the land. I don’t want to own a farm but to inhabit a place, a unique place. Best-as-I-can, I want to tend it for people, for wildlife, for water and plant life.

I dread the thought of being put in a room, or a subdivision or near a shopping centre – somewhere with a flowerbox or container garden, hearing traffic and music blasting from speakers day and night. The day will come, but until then I’d rather live somewhere between the desert and the sown, between the wilderness and the suburbs, in the agricultural world but also of it.