The Work of Nourishment
some garden thoughts on the art & the goal
These last few days I’ve been finally putting my hands to work in our garden. We are past the last threat of frost, which means the gates are wide open — at least, I am reasonably hopeful. If the need comes for me to eat my words, I suppose I’ll have to also cover my seedlings, because they’ve been let loose into the wide world now.
Putting my hands in the soil and feeling the strain of muscles working feels something like coming alive after dormancy. Yesterday, as the sun shone on the just and the unjust, I broke loose from the confines of my indoor job to do some planting, and there was real nourishment in just the work itself.
Before my husband and I were married, two summers ago now, we began to establish our first garden. A scene from the first episode of Little House on the Prairie replayed faintly in my mind as Anthony measured the space and set down markers, and I felt like Ma and Pa Ingalls as we planned how we would build our cabin. Only it wasn’t a cabin; it was our very first garden, an essential part of setting up our new home together. We cut down brush, laid down sheets of OSB to kill the weeds, and he tilled a 20 ft. by 20 ft. area for us to grow food.
I’ve always thought of myself as more of a farmer than a gardener. I love farming; gardening, for many years, I couldn’t feel sure of my footing. Most of my gardening knowledge has come through infusion from growing up within a family of vegetable farmers and watching how my mother did things. Of my own right, I am not a very good gardener, and the first few years of having my own plots in the various rental situations I found myself in after college have been proof of that. But gardening, and more specifically growing food, has provided the foundation for learning how to nourish myself with food.
This year is our third season gardening on the small patch of land behind our current dwelling place. We don’t have a house of our own yet, but we do have a small homestead. It makes my heart swell when I look at the rows of small evergreens, the strawberry patch, and the two gardens that characterize the landscape where it once was goldenrod, briars, and wild grapevines. It’s small, but it’s always expanding. Humble in all respects, but it gives me deep pride. Imperfect, but somehow perfectly representative of this sometimes-haphazard pursuit of nourishing ourselves. It feels sacred and hopeful and right.
Ever since we began our garden, Anthony and I have been working towards a completely no-till method. I only vaguely understood the science of this at first, but after reading this book and watching videos from No-Till Growers on YouTube, I was as thoroughly convinced as my husband. The concept of no-till growing fits with my basic philosophy of agriculture in general, which is that it be done in harmony with the natural created order and with as little disruption as possible.
My husband and I are both of us a little radical at the core, so naturally this appealed to us. We planted cover crops, bought a broadfork, read more books, and watched more videos. We were committed to reducing tillage as much as possible — or bust. Better fertility of soil, and thus more nourishment to us.
Last fall we planted a winter cover of rye all over our gardens, intending to smother and kill it when warmer days came. Without explaining too much, I’ll just say this: it didn’t work quite like we hoped. The rye evaded our efforts at smothering it, and then it was suddenly time to plant. We needed to employ some good old tillage. Anthony and I both felt a little dejected about this situation, which felt dangerously close to failure.
But what is the goal? we reminded ourselves. Is our goal to live up to an arbitrary standard we’ve set for ourselves? Is our goal to be perfect no-till gardeners? Heavens, no. Is it that we have perfectly aerated and healthy soil? Well, yes, in part. All these things matter, but they are not the goal.
Our main goal of having a garden is a simple and concrete one. It is to grow food that nourishes. It might not come about in the most perfectly ideal way. So, we do what must be done.
Anthony tilled, and I’ve been planting. Yesterday, no longer under the threat of frost, I planted our seedlings of cabbage, basil, rosemary, squash, and onions. I tucked celosia into every available corner, because beauty matters (and because our garden is still small, so everything is a little cramped.) Apollos waters, and God gives the increase. I prayed for things to germinate and grow.
Gardening is just a piece of the larger picture, a step in the process of providing nourishment. Sometimes I think it’s more romantic to milk a cow or move a herd of sheep, but the beautiful thing about gardening is that it can be done in so many ways, and to so many ends. It can also be done almost anywhere. Gardening is where I began in this journey towards nourishment.
Nourish may be one of my favorite words. It means “to provide with the food or other substances necessary for growth, health, and good condition.” Secondary to that, to nourish means to “enhance fertility.” Fertility is the ability to produce life, of every kind.
Primarily, we think of nourishment as it relates to eating. As wife and someday a mother, I love that the job of nourishing my family falls predominantly to me. It is a grave but exciting responsibility. Growing up in a farming family, I always had a basic understanding of the importance of food. Eating seasonally and locally has always been normal for me, and I know that in this era of trucked-in hothouse vegetables and enriched, processed foods, I’m quite lucky to have that background. I was eating foods in season that were grown in my region before I even knew this was important, or why.
It has taken many years to grow my understanding of nourishment to the point it is now. I shudder to think of myself in college, eating endless carbs and drinking my coffee black before going to feed the calves in the early morning. Just three years ago, I was living on an organic dairy farm, working to produce the most nutrient-dense food you can imagine, but I was woefully undernourished and over exhausted. I was so busy that I didn’t stop to eat lunch, and so tired by the end of the day that I often ate puffed rice cereal for supper. (At least it was organic, and with raw milk.)
No wonder, I think, now that I know better. I was much too skinny then, and the cycles and rhythms of my body were wildly out of control. I was unhappy, exhausted, short-fused, and stressed through the roof. I had not yet begun to see the importance of nourishing myself as a woman. Oh, how much I had to learn.
All this time, deficiencies and autoimmune symptoms were catching up with me. Like many of us, it was desperation built up from years of feeling sick that gave me the momentum to dive into learning about healing. Right at the point when nourishment seemed a hopeless cause, I began to understand what I needed to do. This was right around the time I got married. I knew I couldn’t be the sick wife; I definitely couldn’t be the sick mom.
If I didn’t believe that we were created by God to eat the food He’s given us, from beasts on the hoof to the things we can grow from the earth, or that this food was called good by Him, I would have a very different view of true nourishment. I would not see the art of the journey it takes to get there, and likely I would only see the pain of trying. But I do believe we were created to be well and to eat well, and I believe food is meant to be simple. It’s so simple, you can grow it in your backyard.
I have been after this long enough that I know what I want to feed my family, and I know what isn’t worth bothering with. I know what we can get by with, what we can’t get by without, and what I’d like to avoid at all costs. I know that saturated fat is essential, carbs give energy, and protein gives endurance. Minerals, sadly lacking in our soils and food today, grant resilience against brain fog and fatigue. And food should be enjoyed, because it is all a gift.
I know that with the way food prices are now, my family is likely going to have to raise a lot of our own meat in order to eat the way we believe in and provide our children with good nourishment, but that’s okay. We are agrarians, and we take part joyfully in the art of nourishing ourselves, whether it be raising animals or planting seeds.
Nourishment doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does come at some cost. Maybe that’s just the cost of learning. I have spent hours and hours (mostly of reading) learning how to heal my allergies and mend the cycles and rhythms of my body.
Nourishment doesn’t have to divide you from those who don’t view food in the same way. This has been a difficult aspect for me, perhaps because I am so radical in my love for good food. It can feel like a travesty of nature to see someone feed their child food that I would never feed to mine — at least if I could help it — and it really does break my heart to see women like me falling for false food fads and dieting advice.
I can offer no solution to this, because I’m still learning myself how to deal with the fact that the world doesn’t generally recognize what’s truly nourishing, and people often look down on those of us who do. I have decided not to spend time anymore degrading the value of lesser-quality food, but instead promoting the good stuff, sharing what I’ve learned, and how it’s literally changed my life. And always doing my best to grow the best food I can for my family in an abundance, so that we can share it beyond these four walls.
We’re all learning, and we should all give grace to one another — and to ourselves. Goodness knows I have had to learn this as well.
We need food every day, several times a day. For the homemaker, wife, and mother, a lot of our job revolves around the production of food. Holistic nourishment is more than merely food, though, and we know this. Humans are nourished by art, relationships, and community. We need spiritual nourishment to grow and thrive. God’s Word is the true nourishment of our souls. We can be fed and spiritually satisfied by it even if our bodies are lacking. The importance of one does not discount the importance of another. If I am interested in living to the glory of the Lord — and I am — my pursuits of bodily nourishment will be towards that goal.
Last night, looking at my garden in the pink twilight, the gratitude I felt was near overwhelming. It is no small thing that we are able to do this. Someday, on more land than this, God willing we will raise our own meat and we will do it to the glory of Him who gives and takes away. But even now, we get to have a small hand in the constant miracle of creation, the soul-deep satisfaction of contributing to our own nourishment. We get to work for it, in a very personal and physical way, and to me that holds eternal significance.
That’s why I love gardening. I will never get over the beauty of the agricultural cycle of work, harvest, enjoyment, and rest. The learning can be daunting and the work often tiring, but the process is a truly an art, and the goal — nourishment of body, mind, and soul — a noble one indeed.
Q. What do you understand by the providence of God?
A. The almighty and ever-present power of God by which God upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty— all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.
Heidelberg Catechism No. 27
For those who might be interested, here is a list of some of the resources that have been immensely helpful to me in learning to nourish myself and my family:
Weston A. Price Foundation — they have a periodical journal and their website is full of information
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morell (obviously)
The Fifth Vital Sign by Lisa Hendrickson-Jack (for women specifically)
The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry (not necessarily about nutrition, but helpful in understanding human patterns and needs)
Pipers Farm: the Sustainable Meat Cookbook by Abby Allen and others
I love what you said about how nourishment comes at a cost. I have found that the cost of providing nourishing foods for my own family is often in the *time* it takes to grind the wheat, etc. and do all the other preparation that goes into creating the best meals I can with the limitations I work with.
I took my first stab at gardening last year and liked it so much, I'm doing it again this year too! I love the balance you've struck between a fiery idealism and boots-on-the-ground reality, a balance I find it difficult to strike as an idealist myself.
Thank you for painting such a beautiful picture of life in the yard!