If you’ve stumbled here or been directed here…read through the blog and get a taste and then check back toward the end of the year when we’ll be launching a new site, a new blog, and some new projects.

jb

* Cultivation of the soil provides direct contact with nature; through the contact with nature the agrarian is blessed with a closer relationship to God. Farming has within it a positive spiritual good; the farmer acquires the virtues of “honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality” and follows the example of God when creating order out of chaos.

* The farmer “has a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which are psychologically and culturally beneficial.” The harmony of this life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society which has grown to inhuman scale.

* In contrast, farming offers total independence and self-sufficiency. It has a solid, stable position in the world order. But urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy our independence and dignity while fostering vice and weakness within us. The agricultural community can provide checks and balances against the imbalances of modern society by its fellowship of labor and cooperation with other agrarians, while obeying the rhythms of nature. The agrarian community is the model society for mankind.

Urban Agrarianism
The work we’re doing with Justice Gardens is an effort to take the principles of the agrarian way of life (among other things) and bring these principles and praxis into the city and the lives of the people who need a way and an example of how to create order out of chaos. But, it’s not just this. It’s not just a cry toward living out of some principle. It’s not just “urban homesteading” or turning your lawn into food. It is those things, but more. It’s more than just getting excited about living self-sufficiently. In fact, it seems to me to be the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish. I get the idea of living sustainably, and I understand the draw of living self-sufficiently in the current climate of world change and peak oil and globalization and all the other things we might be tempted to feel threatened by. It’s easier to live with a sense of identity and place and belonging when you can identify yourself with a group of people that are “doing well” or when the place you live or your neighborhood has a historical tradition that makes you proud or makes you feel blessed to be a part of it. It’s easier for a farmer to feel a sense of place and contact with nature while standing in a field of sunflowers or dusting dirt off the turnips. And that’s just it. If we can somehow bring the farm and feelings and the “place” that the farm is, into the places where that harmony doesn’t exist….then we’re doing justice. We’re not just turning a fallow field into food, or pulling up the grass by it’s roots and planting potatoes, we’re bringing order into the chaos of a “fragmented, alienated modern society.” We’re not living self-suffiently but we’re giving away what we have, in this case, food, in exchange for the reward that comes when we love our neighbor and care for the least and the lost. Urban Agrarianism is both the practice of hospitality and the practice of giving away the ability for others to learn hospitality as they engage in the cultivation of soil. This is not self-sufficiency, it’s community. It’s the local economy extended into the lives and souls of the community by starting first with the food on their plate and where it comes from. Your yard. Your farm. From your healthy sense of place, with soil and greens, and sunlight…to theirs. It isn’t only agrarians cooperating with other agrarians, as Inge puts forth above, but it is the spirit of agrarianism pulling others in to the connection they could have with their food, the land, and the “rhythms of nature.” Food is more than eating.

I’m finding, that while many people right here in our little town of Clintonville seem to “get it” and understand the vision of Justice Gardens, others, who perhaps are less connected with food, less inclined to spill flour all over their counter to make bread or who don’t understand why an heirloom tomato is so important for the world, need a little more detail in order to understand what it is about food that makes it an issue also, about justice.

I’m going to begin a series of posts about food and justice and why they belong together. Throughout the series will also be some thoughts and posts about agrarianism. You see, food, justice, and agrarianism go together like corn, beans, and squash. I’ve been reading a lot about justice….a lot about food…and a lot about the agrarian way of life.  The latter comes to me mostly through the writings of Wendell Berry. The vision for Justice Gardens really is a vision for a kind of urban agrarianism that can connect the people who most need the soil and the food that grows in it to the process of growing it, eating it and everything that can happen in life in the between.

It is my hope for people to understand that food is more than eating. What we do with food, the way we touch it and think about it and enjoy it and share it will make us better or worse because of it.  I hope to convince people that growing food and giving it away is perhaps the most important work to which we can put our hands over the next 20 years.

Last night a friend of mine stopped by with a handful of tomatoes and a cucumber to add to the Rebecca’s Place meal. He told me that was all they had from their garden—three ripe tomatoes and 1 cucumber—and that these vegetables were the “first fruits” of their little plot of justice. Those 4 veggies were placed on my kitchen table for the evening and were there when I woke up yesterday morning. I couldn’t help but think how symbolic those vegetables really are: for Gabe and Anne Williams, who grew them and harvested them as “first fruits” and no doubt prayed while picking them, for Jenny, who stopped by with Augie later that day to pick up those “first fruits” and ended up spending some time with my wife and kids, their lives running into each other as we all try to put our hands to something that we believe in, for me, those 3 tomatoes and that 1 cucumber are symbols of how little bits of faithfulness wind up changing the world…first in our hearts, where we become more attentive to what we can do on this earth to do justice and love mercy, and eventually, out of the abundance of our hearts our words and actions begin to work together to create change.

I think the women at Rebecca’s Place tonight will enjoy eating the good stuff.

I’m hoping Jenny will be able to take some pictures…we’ll keep you posted.

The header is a scanned and cropped image of an original document from the 1943 Victory Garden Campaign published by the US Department of agriculture.  It is a fascinating document and I’m trying to post bits and pieces with some commentary as we unfold what is quickly becoming a very multi-faceted plan for Justice Gardens over the next 5 or so years. I know I’ve hit a nerve in my soul with this Justice Gardens vision because I find myself looking for things to sell in order to pump money into this. Right now, we don’t really have a budget because we don’t really have any money—but, I’m trying my hand out at some grant writing and, hopefully over the next year, we’ll get some things moving.

The Pleasures of Eating

A few nights ago my wife fixed a pleasant meal of rice, kale, and mushrooms. I’m sure there were some spices in there, perhaps some rice vinegar or soy sauce, but eating kale from Ben Sipple’s farm was good. We’ve been eating kale in some form or another for the past 4-6 weeks. Much of the pleasure of my eating that evening at the dinner table was watching little pieces of local kale dangle from the mouths of my little girls and watching it disappear into those little bodies alongside the laughter and silliness and prayers of thankfulness around our dinner table.

The Displeasure of Eating

How much pleasure do you take in eating? I know. This all sounds somewhat elitist, some might say a bit more of a gnostic approach to food than we ought to take. After all, there are people who wouldn’t care one bit where their next meal came from, just that it in fact came in time to live another day. I recognize this. And on an entirely different scale of lamenting, I lament this as well. We might be tempted to place a malnourished underfed child in Nigeria in a different category than, say, a malnourished overfed child in the midwest of America. I’m inclined to say that the travesty is the same, but the difference is not one of degree, but of context and spectrum. Both children suffer from a displeasure of food, one because she doesn’t have enough of it, and the other because he doesn’t care enough about it. One displeasure is caused by lack, and another by an abundance, but they’re both unhealthy, malnourished, and can’t take pleasure in food. Both are hungry for food and don’ t have access to food because of the industrialization of their lives or the globalization of their lives and neither has the ability or the capacity or the opportunity to plant something, watch it grow, and then eat it. One has been robbed of this capacity because of political and historical reasons, another because of reasons of greed and ignorance. One is stuck in a cycle of poverty, while another is stuck in cycle of a mistake made in the generation of his great-grandfather. One goes hungry, while another stuffs his belly with things that aren’t really food.

Over the years people have taken up causes to fight for. Noble causes for justice and good for orphans, for needs, for water, for life, for the world.

Wendell Berry has said that “a significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health.”

I’m trying to say, along with many others, that we need to plant some seeds, watch them grow, eat food, and give food away.

Saving Current Supplies for Future Use

Not one bit of locally grown vegetables or fruit products should be allowed to go to waste. Surplus home-produced vegetables and fruits or local market surpluses obtainable at reasonable prices while still fresh should be used fresh or processed for family consumption. Or, if of good quality these may be given fresh to schools for school lunches, or if prepared under proper supervision by responsible agencies, may be canned, brined, dried, or otherwise processed and given to schools and local welfare institutions.

The entire national food situation will be tremendously bettered and our…needs be more easily supplied, if our farmers and our home owners with suitable ground will grow all the vegetables required for the family. Because of the importance of minerals and vitamins in the diet, special attention should be given to growing the fullest supply of green and leafy vegetables, yellow vegetables, and tomatoes. {Justice} Gardeners must, however, have required space and fertile ground, and tend their gardens faithfully, for we cannot afford to waste seed…and labor…

For more information than you could digest (or preserve) visit a blog I read frequently. Sharon Astyk is a prolific blogger and seems to be doing a lot of thinking about the future of food.

While it doesn’t seem as though my garden will produce enough food that I’ll need to store some for the winter, it is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately as I look for land around town to turn into a Justice Garden. Anyone out there storing food?

]]> http://justicegardens.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/to-promote-the-production-sharing-and-proper-use-of-food-2/feed/ 2 jaredpboyd http://justicegardens.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/working-for-justice-500-miles-away-from-my-own-backyard/ http://justicegardens.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/working-for-justice-500-miles-away-from-my-own-backyard/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:59:33 +0000 jaredboyd http://justicegardens.wordpress.com/?p=21 Continue reading →]]> I just got back from vacation. I thought I would have a better internet connection to do some writing here at Justice Gardens…I did do a lot of thinking though. I came to the conclusion that while I’m away on vacation, my garden is growing and producing food even while I’m doing nothing. We came home to weeds nearly choking out our 7 tomato plants, but we also came home to the second wave of broccoli flourets that the girls and I nibbled on while we weeded the vines and grass and rescued the spring mix. I told Jenny to come by (since she is my neighbor) and harvest some frisee for her salads while we were gone. And while Jenny isn’t part of a neglected group of people and she eats lots of fruits and veggies as often as she can, her husband started back at school and I’m sure a little pickin’ from my garden was worth the two-block walk—veggies in the bellies of her little ones without breaking open the piggy-bank or using money from the lemonade stand. We all can use a little garden picking from time to time—harvesting where we didn’t sow. Less, perhaps, for reasons of economy and grocery bills and more so because picking food from your neighbors garden while they’re on vacation seems like community…food for one’s soul is worth as much as any gastronome. The economy does matter. And there really is a food crisis coming to your own neighborhood in the next few years…not just around the globe where we hear of rice shortages and such, but a food shortage in our own back yard, not least for reasons noted on the front page of today’s NYT’s. This all matters, but with gardens growing food while we go about our day—at work, on vacation—we can mitigate the impact of the american food crisis while at the same time tilling the soil of each other’s lives that only a connection to the soil and souls of others can bring.

That’s right. Food. Beautiful food growing up from the ground. Broccoli heads starting to come forth and cabbage starting to wind tight together in the center— its big purple leaves dripping with last night’s rain. Food has never looked so good to me than when it looks at me with colors and shapes from my own backyard.

I went out this morning to clip some lettuce for my lunch today. I harvested arugula and frisee, red lettuce and buttercrunch and mixed this with some baby greens I pulled to thin out the romaine a bit. I piled it high and wanted so badly to invite someone over who has never had “spring mix” before in their lives to share it with me and my wife at our table. A quick aside: we eat on the table that my grandfather used to butcher on—don’t worry, it is clean. It has been very interesting, and telling, for me to watch my garden grow a spot inside my own soul, growing in the dirt with the rain and the sun and worm castings, while at the same time growing something too underneath my skin—a great big hospitality plant with broad leaves and I hope roots that are deeper still, though time will tell whether this great passion in me to share good food with those who don’t usually eat good food, is just a seed that springs up quickly only to later wilt in the hot sun, or it winds up being one of those things that somebody somewhere will want to talk about a generation from now like I did about canning with my grandmother.

My garden is just under 60 square feet and it will feed both my wife and I a fantastic salad for lunch today and more tomorrow. Imagine what a roof-top garden could do on the top of every flat roof in Columbus Ohio. Imagine the food we could grow if we tore down the fence between my backyard and yours and we planted a justice garden that was “30 X 50 feet or larger” (a quote from the US Government Campaign To Promote The Production, Sharing and Proper User of Food).

Jenny sent me a fantastic video that is saying this very thing with everything it is and does and has been doing, it seems, for a long time: The Homeless Garden Project. It seems to share a common vision and ethos as our vision for Justice Gardens.