If we can just keep growing each year, we can all become small oases of knowledge, skill, seed, and even physical nutrients. We can help produce food for ourselves, our loved ones, our community, and even the bugs, birds, baboons and mole rats.

We can take responsibility for our own nourishment. Even if some plants don’t grow well, failure need not change our underlying mindset. We can, plant by plant and season by season, learn what it takes to grow things. And in that knowledge, we will respect both the grower and the food, even if we are not the grower. The grower will never again be invisible to us.

Last year I added many new beds in our old nursery propagation area, imagining that I had unlocked a successful approach in other areas of the farm, and all I needed to do was replicate that approach. Instead, I overstretched myself and our water capacity, and found myself with struggling plants. A vicious cycle- too many beds and too little water requires even more care to get a yield from struggling plants.

So I was reminded that great systems should not always be scaled, and that growing is always a dance between grower and environment. Large scale agriculture tends to be scalable and prescriptive only because it ignores or oversimplifies the environment in which it exists. Yet the infinite complexity of this environment is where we find wisdom, and ourselves.

Workshops

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