Why I Love Gardening at Sea Call Farm
A message from fellow gardener Deirdre White and her feelings about the Sea Call Farm community garden, posted with her permission:
“At Sea Call Farm we are both individually and as a community caretakers of the land we have been provided. It is not ours, or even the Town’s, if you are willing to look beyond the transactional. It was here before us, and it will be here, I hope, for long after we put our trowels away. Like all land, maybe especially conservation land, we hold it in trust for future generations, or even for the next caretakers who join the community. The land is, in its essence, a gift, not a commodity. We are the happy and grateful recipients. It seems a privilege and not something to be taken for granted.
Of course, caretaking of this gift, even a half plot (!), brings with it responsibilities which benefit and maintain the land, the caretaker neighbors, and the community. If we don’t agree to fulfilling our responsibilities to the land and to each other and then act accordingly, we have, in some sense, already chosen to leave the community (there are exceptions to this, such as illness).
A second point is the scarcity of the resource we are tending. There are a finite number of community garden plots in Orleans, and there is a waiting list of people who would like to have a garden. If our goal is to be a community which oversees the beneficial caretaking of our gift, we need to be ready to uphold that. If any one of us chooses to see it as a commodity, something to be used up as needed, ignored or taken for granted, without regard for land and neighbor, then there is a problem on many levels. A scarce resource should be maintained by a person who will take care of it, or, if not, passed on to a more committed caretaker without hesitation or guilt. Even in mid-season, there is plenty to plant for harvest later in the year for a new gardener/caretaker.
As you may have guessed, this is a spiritual relationship for me – this covenant with the land and the community. It may be for some of you as well.
Many thanks for reading this. I hope it contributes to the conversation.
– Deirdre White”
Recent Comments