Carver and the Garden
Between 1898 and 1944 George Washington Carver published a series of bulletins detailing small-scale agricultural initiatives that could help the “poor tenant farmer with a one-horse equipment.”
https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/carver/exhibits/show/bulletins/carver
Today, more applicable than ever, Carver’s 44 bulletins detail activities that can, with minimal expenditure of capital but not insignificant expenditure of labor, increase the nutrition and even revenue of the common person. Known foremost for association with the peanut, Carver’s bulletins are however far-ranging in scope, and encompass hog raising, poultry production, and myriad other procedures to help raise, however slightly, the downtrodden from economic and nutritional misery.
Let us not for a minute be fooled into thinking that agriculture is a backwards or retrograde pursuit, the province of the uneducated or unambitious. There is a grim reason that large companies such as Monsanto or Bayer seek to control the yearly allocation of seeds to the world’s farmers; there is profit and independence in agriculture, and the large companies seek to keep the former for themselves and the latter entirely out of reach.
Of course, to effectively implement a Carver Garden, one needs access to land, and many of those that could most benefit from a small garden are dammed up in cities, without access to any cultivable land whatsoever. While this problem could be solved by allocating a parking spot size plot to each resident of a city and a corresponding flatbed trailer parked on each, packed with soil from the excavations from building sites and enriched by compost generated by city residents in the course of their daily affairs, for now, let us merely consider the benefits of a simple backyard garden in a suburban tract of land.
Beginning in February 2020, a person, possessing no more than average ability towards agriculture, and an above average disinclination towards labor, has since enjoyed a great number of vegetables from the garden and the company of an array of wildlife. A conservative estimate of the economic value of the garden, with no reference to nutritive value, would place it at least at $1,000 in terms of what those vegetables would cost if purchased from a market.
Moreover, as Voltaire and Goethe — among others — have observed, there are intangible and psychological benefits to tending a garden, as well as the immune-boosting effect of getting soil beneath one’s fingernails.
Much maligned is the wasp, but, as has been shown through now some five months experience in the garden, the wasp is entirely uninterested in harassing the human, and is intent only on looking for little insects and larvae to eat that would otherwise eat or harm the human’s vegetables. Far from being a pest, the vicious-looking wasp is a pollinator and a human ally in the garden. The small sparrow, overlooked, under-appreciated, and often attacked, if only because of its ubiquity, is another champion species of the garden. It has a delightful song and seems to revel in accompanying the human in the garden in the early evenings, approaching in close proximity without fear, and singing as it and its mate look for bugs to eat. Bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies are attracted in great number to the flowers of the cucumbers, squashes, tomatoes, radishes, eggplant, mints, and onions.
