“Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless..”

–Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

 

I begin my twelfth-grade literature curriculum with a walk around the school. When I did so last August, the grounds offered little on which to comment apart from some handsome, spire-like oak trees and a few hunched yew shrubs that had seen better days. This year, when I asked the class to write reflectively about how the physical space of the school affects the inner space of the students’ lives, almost all of them fixed their attention on a single place: the Classical Roots vegetable garden. 

 

Some of them actually wrote their responses while sitting between the rows of heirloom tomato plants, trellised pole beans, and frothing zinnias. Blue skimmers―a species of dragonfly that has come to feed on the smaller insects that now call the garden home―alighted on the tomato stakes that rose over the students’ heads, gently flexing their wings in the sun. As the time of reflective writing ended and our conversation began, the vitality of the reciprocal relationship between the place and the practice of education struck me once again. The garden was feeding the students not just physically, but also imaginatively. It was a talking point, but also a place in which to hold a conversation. 

 

There is a thrill in walking through a very old garden. We often call the sense of vinted time and effort dwelling in such a place its maturity. A mature garden is, perhaps, watched over by fruit trees in their high-yielding prime, patrolled by a variety of insects, colored by established perennials, and metalled by the footsteps of many a quiet stroll. But there is a different sort of thrill in a new garden. Our one-year-old vegetable patch, even in its late-summer splendor, feels even lovelier because it’s easy to recall the bare batch of chemically-laced grass that still occupied its place last September. 

 

Since then, the seeds planted by the Class of 2022 have, both figuratively and literally, yielded far more fruit than I expected. The rumpled leaves of Lacinato kale now reach up to a height of nearly five feet next to the bean patch that they dug out by hand with mattocks. Kentucky Wonder pole beans have twined themselves around teepees that last year’s class lashed together out of fallen limbs from the local woodland. The dirt that we once found so compacted and dead that not even an earthworm could push through it now hosts them by the bucket-full. 

 

And that general sense of thriving has also translated itself to the program in general. Over the summer we hosted families from across the school, both well-established and newly-enrolled, who volunteered to tend and harvest from the garden during the summer months. Members of our Stewardship Club, now elevated by the administration into an official Prefecture and student government council, came unprompted to campus to keep the garden watered and tended during a brutal drought. Staff members snuck in during free afternoons to take care of the weeding, passers-by shewed away rabbits and, back in our administrative offices, a shocking number of parents and friends wrote checks that allowed us not just to keep the program running, but to plan for its rapid expansion during the next academic year. 

 

This is only the beginning. Between now and the graduation of the Class of 2023, the grounds of the school will be even more dramatically transformed. Our goal isn’t just the involvement of more students and families, or the expansion of the veg garden, or even the involvement of each grade, Pre-K through 12. It is to redeem the landscape, welcoming nature among us and transforming ourselves into a model of how the cultivation of nature can be comprehensively integrated into a school. We’re not entirely sure what the ultimate harvest of our efforts will look like but, so far, the fruit has been sweet.   

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

–Keats

 

Lacking the time, space, and experience necessary to grow our crops from seed, we bought most of what we planted this first spring from a lovely local grower who specializes in organic heirloom vegetable varieties. 

 

It was a gorilla affair that involved our Academic Dean running to the nursery on consecutive Sunday afternoons and simply grabbing what was there. We ended up with boxes brimming over with acid-green fronds, the new growth of dozens of seedlings: purple heirloom tomatoes, bushy basils, the woody spires of rosemary and, of course, the obligatory zucchinis. With plenty of room to plant and not wanting to waste anything, we plunked two of them in the ground not far from the summer herbs. 

 

Now, heretofore, my experience with zucchini has been ambiguous at best. Every year that I’ve gardened we seem to grow one and every year by mid-July we end up struggling even to give them away. The zucchini is a prodigious producer that, once the summer hits, seems to bear a dozen fruit a day beneath its palm-like, tropically-spotted leaves. And what’s more, if you look away from the plant for five minutes, those fruit seem always to balloon into yellow baseball bats that are far too big for anything except to laugh at. My wife and I, out for a summer evening walk, once left one on the hood of a friend’s car as a joke. It was the size of a dog and sickly yellow-green.

 

The problem, of course, is what to do with all that abundance. And the typical solutions are decidedly uninspiring, the main one being zucchini bread which, although sometimes quite good, always strikes me as fundamentally deceptive. “The veg is being snuck into this bread,” I think as I bite into it, “and the disguise has not quite worked.”

 

It’s an issue that is aggravated by zucchini’s primary characteristics: its springy texture and mild flavor. And it wasn’t until this summer that I learned the secret of the humble zucchini. That secret came in the form of a single sentence in a cookbook written by Merrill Stubbs: “Zucchini is basically a sponge.” As I read that sentence, the truth hit me like lightning: zucchini is part of a grand company of foods, including chicken and potatoes, that exist to absorb rather than to create flavor. And just like these other humble ingredients, if treated with care and dignity, it can be delicious. 

 

So I noodled zucchini, salted it, microwaved it for two minutes, then tossed it in pesto and sprinkled it with toasted pistachios. Then I covered it in chopped mint, olive oil, chili flakes, and red wine vinegar and roasted it in my grill, following up the roasting with a blackening toast under the broiler. Then I diced it into half-moons and tossed it together with pickled red onions, vinegar, oil, salt, and dill and ate it as a side salad. Then I cut it into spears, busted out my mustard and turmeric, and made pickles out of them. 

 

By the end of the month of July I found myself hovering over the school’s zucchini plant every week hoping for more in spite of the ongoing drought. It was a good reminder that, as in education, the simplest and most often-ignored  ingredients in a kitchen only become mundane if our approach to them lacks imagination. A thousand good essays can be written with the same outline. And, as it turns out, a thousand good dinners can be made with a spongy green squash. 

 

Now if only I can find a way to start liking eggplant. 

Once in a golden hour

I cast to earth a seed.

Up there came a flower,

The people said, a weed…

 

    –Tennyson, “The Flower”

 

When I was around twelve, a neighborhood friend of mine took me on a foraging expedition. It was a fresh green June in the mountains of North Carolina and, since her parents owned a summer camp where her house also lay, we had acres of field and forest at our disposal. Like many foragers in the first flush of their enthusiasm, her passion hadn’t yet been tempered much by knowledge or experience. But fortunately for us both, she at least knew enough not to touch any mushrooms. 

 

Instead, we combed the big grassy field near her house, mostly on our bellies. We must have looked like beached fish from a distance, occasionally flopping up and down in our excitement. It was a humble harvest: clover blossoms, spruce tips, dandelion leaves, wild onions. Tossing it all into a big wooden bowl from her mother’s kitchen we perched on the steps of her house, mixed up the morning’s dividends, and ate it all without dressing—without even washing it. 

 

It tasted…as you might imagine. Sour and peppery, with discordant notes of menthol from the spruce tips. And that meal of greens was enough to satisfy my curiosity about foraging for quite some time. Indeed, even now that I have learned far more about growing things and about how to combine flavors, I am primarily a garden cook as opposed to a forager. These are two different breeds, both with their peculiarities and passions.

 

And yet I do sometimes experience something akin to the forager’s pleasure, which is nearly always shot through with the excitement of surprise. These moments happen when I discover some new aspect of a plant I thought I fully understood. I have seen such pleasure wash over my student volunteers at unexpected moments, like when I explained to one ninth-grade boy that you can eat all of a snow pea, not just the round little fruits on the inside of the pod. Eyes wide, he popped the whole thing into his mouth as if he’d somehow cheated the system. Then he went back for more, though I feel reasonably confident that he never would have eaten the peas at all if his curiosity hadn’t been piqued by the discovery of this new aspect of the plant. 

 

For my own part, there have been two such discoveries this summer. The first is common Purslane, a lobed, succulent-like weed resembling a sort of crawling jade plant that I have been pulling handfuls of out of my garden for years. Its little yellow flowers are followed by a torrent of tiny black seeds that will colonize your garden easily if left unchecked, and I have cursed it many times without knowing its name. 

 

It wasn’t until this year that I discovered the name of Purslane, a plant that hales from North Africa but which had already made itself comfortable in North America by pre-Columbian times. As it turns out, the stuff is highly nutritious, one of the only plants to contain significant amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids, and has been cultivated in many places for time immemorial as both a medicinal and a culinary crop. The Greeks, in their typical nonchalant style, like to toss it onto a block of feta cheese alongside salted half-moons of cucumber and a sprinkling of olive oil and vinegar. It has a mild, slightly briny taste, with the merest hint of an oyster’s freshness but none of its funk. The one trick with Purslane is not to confuse it with Spurge, a superficially similar plant that happens to be poisonous. But after a quick Google, identification becomes easy and you may begin turning this pest into a garnish right away—a literally delicious form of revenge. 

 

The other discovery is Bee Balm. I have kept Bee Balm in my garden for years both as an ornamental and because, as its name implies, bees of all varieties adore it. Its midsummer flowers erupt with the blazing colors of a firework in slow-motion, tipping in the breeze and almost always rumbling with the sound of insects busy harvesting its nectar. I have admired it for as long as I’ve been gardening, but only this year did I learn you can eat its leaves. They taste like a mixture of parsley and oregano, with a strong peppery verve, and can be used wherever oregano would go. I have sprinkled its chopped leaves on pizza and lentil salad and, when my tomatoes come in, I’ll be adding them to my annual batches of homemade sauce. You can, of course, also make tea out of it, a process more commonly associated with its other name: Bergamont. 

 

Gardening is not a fixed enterprise. Even a meticulously-kept garden is always changing. And so, too, a gardener must change. In fact, like a plant, a gardener who isn’t growing is probably dying. The more time I spend around green and growing things, the less I feel like the master of the situation and the more I feel like a pioneer, glimpsing the fringe of an apparently limitless frontier. If I can share some of that thrill with my students, I will have done something to be proud of. Or, rather, I will have allowed the garden to do what a garden will always do if we stop and let it: to win us over again with freshness and delight. 

“The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning.”

–T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

 

Squash is a tenacious plant. The internal temperature of a hot, healthy compost pile can reach anywhere from 120 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit, cooking the seeds and roots of most plants into dutiful submission. But only a few days after my students and I spread our fresh, sifted mulch onto the new veg beds last spring, the unmistakable seed leaves of squash plants began to appear, dotting the soil where we hoped to grow tomatoes, chard, or herbs.

 

I hate to bring this news to the well-meaning mothers who pack their lunches, but the amount of cucumbers discarded on a daily basis by our Logic School alone is intimidating. And doubtless these were the children of those cast-off veggies, which had survived the crucible of composting only to rear their heads in fresh surroundings. 

 

And yet it was impossible to be sure. Anyone who has grown multiple varieties of tomatoes or, heaven help us, morning glories will understand the dilemma that faces a gardener at such moments. What was in this spot last year? Or did this seed come from the mulch? It is very difficult to be sure exactly what you will get if you let a volunteer into your space. 

 

This mysteriousness is especially true of squash in its million forms, which all look exactly the same until the plants have grown into the size of a well-fed German Shepherd, taking up valuable real estate that could have been occupied by a known ally. I once allowed a volunteer squash to grow right out of my compost pile, excited to taste the harvest of fat Butternuts I was certain would emerge in autumn. What I got instead was a mammoth plant that yielded close to fifty decorative gourds, bright green and butter yellow, each the spitting image of the ones that had graced our Thanksgiving table the year before. The moral of the story being that volunteers will always yield something but, in order to enjoy it, you must be willing to give up the tempting illusion of control. 

 

The same principle is true of the human volunteers who have arrived on a weekly basis this summer to help tend the Classical Roots Veg Garden: you never really know what you are going to get. Some families have been experienced and green-thumbed Rhetoric School troops who attacked the weeds in clean formation and taught me more about horticulture than I taught them. Others have been wide-eyed Grammar School families whose only growing experience was with grass and whose children could not lift a full watering can on their own. 

 

But, no matter who the volunteers were or how much experience they brought with them, there was not a single family that didn’t delight me or infuse the garden with life. The first reason for this success is that gardening is not ultimately all that hard. The second is that the point of this particular garden is not primarily to fill people’s bodies but to feed their minds. 

 

First and foremost, our garden is a place of education; a classroom. An unorthodox classroom in our age, but an obvious one from the perspective of history. The Benedictine monks of the Monastic Period or the strolling philosophers of the School of Athens would each recognize our garden as a place of education, of ideas exchanged, theories swapped, and passions ignited. And so it is. Many living things are thriving there—I am especially proud of our sun gold tomatoes—but chief among them are our youngest gardeners, who are asking questions and learning skills that will prove essential to the next generation of Creation’s stewards and indeed to Creation itself. 

 

I am, therefore, in favor of letting volunteers grow. Of giving them enough space and a good mulching. Nature cannot really be controlled anyway, only shepherded. And doing so with an open mind will always yield a harvest of delight.

“Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.”

 

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

 

Americans love their lawns. Indeed, it is hard to form a complete idea of America without the smell of fresh-cut grass or the mown stripes that checker a baseball field in high summer. We love our lawns so much, in fact, that we devote about nine billion gallons of water daily to land irrigation—about 320 gallons per family per day. 

 

That is a lot of water. Faced with the sheer volume that we use, it is a little staggering to realize that the vast majority of it is spent in service of our love of grass, a single plant that has come to characterize almost our entire relationship with the outdoors. 

 

Westerners fell in love with close-shorn grass around the seventeenth century, when wealthy land owners in Britain began to create them by grazing sheep on their estates. Nostalgia has always been a strong factor in the creation of big houses and the management of big properties. And the landed gentry at that time liked to invite their guests into a sort of idyll that recalled Britain’s simpler agrarian past. After all, who wouldn’t want to glance up from their dinner in the great hall to see a cloud of fluffy white sheep drifting its way across the green distance?

 

The trouble was that these guests didn’t actually want to step in the waste that such herds produced, so estate owners began to fence off the areas closer to their houses and compel servants to cut these sections, a task that was originally done with hand-sharpened sickles at a rate of about an inch per stroke. As time went on, machines replaced the hand tools and so a close-cut lawn came within the financial reach of the middle class. 

 

And because America is the land where each family’s home is a symbol of personal achievement, we have naturally adopted the lawn for its iconic association with those great estates across the water. Yet, as a global ecology, we’re at a crossroads at which we gradually realize that water is not a free and unlimited resource. It can run out. Actually, it already is. 

 

I often see evidence of this dawning realization when I drive to school in the morning. During the warmer months, the local government likes to install an electric orange-and-black road sign on the way into town announcing an “EMERGENCY WATER BAN,” following this message with a somewhat desperate-sounding “PLEASE NO OUTDOOR WATERING.” I must confess that, during this first year of the Classical Roots garden, I have ignored that sign on a daily basis and watered our fledgling veggies with a leaky hose. 

 

But I comfort myself a little with the knowledge that, in the process of digging in those garden beds, the students and I tore up quite a few underground sprinkler lines. So many, actually, that we eventually got the Head of School’s exasperated permission to rip out the nozzles wholesale and have an entire section of the school’s irrigation system permanently turned off. If I die now, I will have done my service to society. 

 

But I would prefer to live on, if only so that I can enact the other half of my plan in the autumn: beginning to push the school very slowly towards water independence. For our modest vegetable garden’s needs, two or three rain barrels should do the trick. At my house I have come to know and love a particular model that is hilariously called the Rain Catcher 4000, a title that sounds like either a relic of advertising from the 1950s or a very poorly conceived sequel to the movie Blade Runner. 

 

There are, however, many options for rain barrels and all of them share the same features: a wide mouth that you install under a gutter’s downspout and a small hose from which you can pour the collected rainwater into a watering can. Thirty minutes of rain easily fills up my entire fifty-gallon barrel, a supply that can last me in my home garden for more than a week. For the school’s garden, two or three would give us ample water for our needs. The best part? It’s free. It literally falls from the sky and runs into the drains. Catch a little of it, and you can turn it into beauty and deliciousness for no more trouble than it takes to spray some water out of a hose. 

 

For now, I will content myself with a few of these rain barrels around the school. Eventually, though, I will spring my larger schemes on the administration: xeriscaping, native grass plantings, and dry-garden spaces that will take little investment and quickly pay for themselves with the resulting reduction in our water and landscaping bills. I must admit, though, that saving water is only a byproduct of my campaign against lawns: what I really want is to look out my classroom window and see more flowers. Perhaps even some sheep. 

 

I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.

 

–Robert Frost, “After Apple-Picking”

 

There is a strange give and take to a garden’s relationship with the landscape and ecology that surround it. Most people who make a brand new vegetable garden begin with tomato plants: a good choice since a tomato starts to taste less and less like itself from the instant you take it off the vine. A fresh tomato is the wonder and privilege of the home gardener, a marker of summer and a feast that will spoil store-bought tomatoes for you forever. (Incidentally, if you really want the most bang for your buck, you should get your gardening feet wet by planting some herbs, which will both taste delicious and save you a fortune at the grocery store). But when you try to repeat that pleasure by planting tomatoes in the same space every year, a law of diminishing returns kicks into effect. Since each kind of plant takes certain nutrients from the soil, planting the same species in the same spot over and over again will cause future crops to be more feeble, more starved, and more prone to disease. Eventually, the tomatoes might simply refuse to yield. 

 

Yet if you rotate what you plant, you foster a magical exchange by which the nutrients taken out by one group of veggies are replaced by the next because, of course, plants do not only suck things from the ground. As living and digesting organisms, they also leave things behind. So, if you rotate your crops by planting legumes, brassicas, and root vegetables in sequence, you perpetuate a loop of positive nutrition that will keep everything green and flourishing. Add some homemade organic compost to the mix as mulch and your soil will actually increase in health rather than dying out. Once we become aware of the wisdom that stands behind this ancient practice, it is not hard to see why the huge industrial farming complexes that only grow monocultures of corn, tobacco, or wheat year after year have to rely on chemical fertilizers to keep things going. The trick, of course, is that we end up ingesting some of these chemicals when we consume the crops. Much better to grow our own corn if we can. 

 

Of course, most of us do not only plant corn or even tomatoes in every square foot of our home gardens. We crave variety. We want to try new things. Thus the plantings of gardens are often as much the product of human curiosity as they are of the human need for sustenance, which is perhaps why I grew “Orient Express” eggplants for years even though I can’t stand the taste of eggplant. I just liked the look of the things, with their sleek, glossy skin the color of an October sunset. And this impulse should absolutely be honored because monoculture is as deadly to the gardener’s morale as it is to the soil itself. 

 

The Classical Roots veg garden is no exception. If you wandered by it this week you could find old standards like “Bright Lights” Swiss Chard and Arugula “Roquette” growing there.  But, scanning the beds a little more closely, you’d also see some unusual specimens like white beets or the freakishly tough rosemary “Hill’s Hardy.” Perhaps most importantly, you’d discover ornamental flowers that might not seem to have any business in a vegetable garden at all, like French Marigolds and some purple catmint we split off from decorative borders elsewhere in the school. 

 

Yet marigolds, apart from adding some fiery color to the edges of the beds all summer, also happen to repel tomato worms. And catmint draws pollinating bees into the garden in droves, assuring that the squash and peppers will bear their fruit in due time. Satisfyingly, when I first told our students that we’d be growing flowers in the vegetable garden, they didn’t question it all. In fact the first feedback I got was from a 12th-Grade girl who said simply: “Oh good. I was just thinking we needed a little color.” There is ancient wisdom latent in the common craving we all feel to “brighten up” a food garden with a few flowers here and there. When that impulse strikes, we shouldn’t resist it. Doing so would starve both our imaginations and the soil.  

 

posted 6/10/2022

 

When despair for the world grows in me…

I come into the peace of wild things

 

―Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” 

 

This morning I realized that I’ve unconsciously developed a habit. I’m not sure when it started. But every day before school I find myself taking a walk through the garden. Part of the cause, I think, is simply the old gardener’s desire to “check up on things,” pulling a weed here, adjusting a trellis there, fiddling and fussing. But if I’m being honest, there is generally nothing urgent that needs to be accomplished at that time of day. No, I think that what really draws me there is the calming effect that simply being present in a garden has. Walking the crisp paths, smelling the cherry blossoms or the menthol musk of catmint when the wind blows through it, getting my hands in the dirt, or sampling a leaf from the arugula, all of that somehow makes me more prepared to face the day’s vicissitudes and responsibilities.  

 

Obviously, I am not the only one who associates these feelings with a garden. The student leaders of our school Stewardship Club ask me every day if there is anything in the garden that needs doing. When I reply no, which does occasionally happen, they are visibly disappointed. And sometimes I find they have ignored me altogether and snuck out to do some weeding or raking during a free period anyway. The task of gardening, once we learn a bit about how to do it, seems to exercise a kind of gravity on most people. Gardening feels like a natural extension of the human experience, an experience which increasingly leaves us longing for the order, growth, and sense of accomplishment that gardens so readily provide. 

 

Until recently, most gardeners probably believed that this calming effect was a matter of personal disposition, or at least of healthy discipline. Gardening, we thought, calmed us down because raising plants was a habit that got us going outdoors, soaking up some Vitamin D, and eating a little better. But, during the last decade, biologists have discovered that the microbial life found in garden soil actually creates calming chemical responses in the human brain when we come in contact with it. So, it turns out that the peaceful effects of gardening are not the result of whimsical feelings but of biological facts. 

 

This discovery feels especially poignant to me in light of the exponential spike in mental health issues experienced by high school students since the pandemic. Modern young people are more anxiety-ridden, more doubtful, and more grim in their outlook than any generation in recent history. And, as a teacher, I do not believe I am alone in feeling that my typical array of resources is somehow inadequate to meet my students’ rising needs. It is hard not to feel like the whole situation has grown beyond the pale. And when I started the Classical Roots Program, I did not think of it as any sort of answer to those needs. But it has become one. Quietly at first, but then increasingly and now profoundly, our garden is drawing the students toward itself. There is something on offer, partly biological but also partly spiritual, lying latent in the soil. Peace, perhaps, and several kinds of nourishment. If you are reading this and wondering whether your school should do something similar, the answer is yes, you should. You should do so as soon as you can. Your school counselor will thank you for it. And even if they don’t, it will make a great place for a morning walk. 

 

–Alex Miller, Jr.

 

posted 6/5/2022

 

I seem / separate from the ground…but there’s all this what is it?…roots roots roots…

–Ted Hughes, “Wodwo”

 

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month. This signals to me that he must have known something about gardening because, in New England, April is a month of cold days, cold soil, and boiling ambitions. 

 

The students were constantly pestering me about when we would actually be planting out some seedlings. Our chemistry teacher had raised quite a few tomatoes, summer squash, and kale from seed as part of a project on acidity and acid rain. Three different groups of these seedlings were exposed to three different levels of acidity, and the ones that survived were gifted to us to plant out in the garden. But tomatoes and summer squash hale from much warmer climates and, if you put them into cold soil when there is still a potential for frost, they will either die outright or stop growing, leaving themselves exposed to diseases and hungry slugs. As with many other things, the gardener’s main virtue when it comes to putting out seedlings is patience. 

 

But finally the day had come. It was mid-May and windy but warm. You can only really learn if the soil has warmed up by testing it with your hands and, as we reached into the tilled earth and scooped up handfuls, it felt comfortable and benevolent. In addition to the gifts from the chemistry department, we had bought chard, beets, Brussels sprouts, thyme, sage, and rosemary from a local organic farm. Armed with our trowels we drew some clean lines in the dirt and started planting. 

 

I had to watch the eager students closely because, instinctively, we tend reach for the stem when we plant, shying away from the tender leaves. But doing so is a huge mistake. This is because, while a seedling can always produce more leaves, it has only one stem. If you break the stem when you are planting it out, the thing will never recover and your time and money will have been spent in vain. Counterintuitive as it may seem, you need to grip the young plants by the leaves and then lower them into the place you’ve prepared for them. 

 

An alumnus of ours, who had graduated last year and went on to study sustainable agriculture in college, was back on campus to help us plant things out. He set down his coffee mug on our little fieldstone wall and knelt down beside one of the waddle-fenced beds. “This is the best thing the school has ever done,” he said. 

 

I agreed, but for a different reason than the one he probably had in mind. An organic veg garden will not, on its own, tip our campus that much closer to biological regeneration. Vegetable gardens attract all manner of living things (some desirable, some not!) and, if managed well and organically, will probably have a net positive effect on the local biome. But, compared to the concentrated planting of native species, ridding our campus of cut grass, practicing systematic water collection, and the like, its actual ecological impact will be relatively small. But I’m a teacher. The tangible benefits are only part of what I am going for. All of those land management victories can, with luck, come in time. But the first harvest I’d actually hoped to reap was kneeling here beside me. If the garden had not been here, this student’s interest in our campus might have evaporated on graduation day. Yet here he was, in his spare time, putting a trowel in the dirt. He was not elsewhere but here, in the place I had prepared for him. 

 

–Alex Miller, Jr. 

 

posted 5/27/2022

 

Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.  –Seamus Heaney, “Digging”

 

All of our tools at the school are borrowed. From the maintenance department. Which is a bit of a shame, because it is always best to find a tool that fits your hand just right and then hang on to it. Like many gardeners before me, I have developed an openly territorial relationship with my favorite spade. It is nothing special, but the balance and the feel are right and I don’t like other people using it.

 

There is a myth that you need all kinds of tools to begin a garden. I think this falsehood comes to us from walking through the aisles of garden centers, where the manifold tools glisten from their rows of hangers like a medieval arsenal, each supposedly with its own task. But all you really need is a mattock for carving out the beds, a flat-nosed spade for digging, a pair of pruning shears, and a trowel. Everything beyond that is a luxury, and it seems best to expand the collection deliberately and slowly. 

 

The first composite hand tools were developed in the Stone Age and the designs have not changed very much in all that time. Some things, once perfected, simply cannot be improved. If you pick up a well-made garden spade you’ll see what I mean. It forms a clean line between your arm and the earth and, when you strike the soil with it, you’ll be shocked how deep you can dig with just a few strokes. Once you find a good one, you’ll realize that most of the supposedly essential tools they sell in Home Depot are nothing but petty salesmanship. 

 

And yet it is odd to see how tentative teenagers get when you put a shovel in their hands. Students who would passionately argue, against all comers, that Elizabeth Bennett should have married Mr. Wickham at the end of Pride and Prejudice will balk when you tell them to rip up some grass and dig a hole. 

 

This past spring, the perennial catmint we had planted along a border near the entrance to the Upper School failed to come up again. Its roots had been trampled overwinter by the crowds of students who would gather outside during breaks, braving the Massachusetts cold to feel a bit of pale sun on their backs. But I found a few healthy catmints growing elsewhere on campus, so I piled our borrowed old spades into a wheelbarrow and made a spectacle of myself by leading the Stewardship Club through the Grammar School and out to the border where they grew. 

 

It was early April and the acid-green shoots had just begun to break through the earth: the perfect time to divide a herbaceous perennial plant like catmint. I dug one out, shaking the soil off the roots, and chopped it into three parts with a spade, plunking two of the pieces into the barrow and burying the other back in the dirt. “Now you do it to these others,” I told them. 

 

No takers. Not a single person moved. Finally, as my baffled expression melted into a pained one, a tenth-grade boy reached for a spade and jabbed it reluctantly into the mulch next to one of the catmints. He was so hesitant you would think I had asked him to hack an actual cat in half. “Dig!” I told him. “With conviction!” There was another awkward minute, broken at last by an eleventh-grade girl who snatched the spade from his hand and drove it collar-deep into the ground. “This will do!” She said. A light had come into her eyes. The light of a gardener who has found her tool. And like magic, the students grabbed their own and fell in line. Soon, we had all the new plants we’d need.

 

–Alex Miller, Jr.

posted 5/20/22

 

I was thy neighbor once, thou rugged Pile!

–William Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”

 

Even conservative estimates tell us that, in a patch of earth no bigger than most people’s lawns, there exist more living organisms than there are stars in the known universe. At least, this is how it ought to be. 

 

But the standard practice of most lawn owners calls for routine close-mowings and an armory of chemical fertilizers. This strategy makes lawns green and luscious. But it also causes lymphoma in children and reduces our soil, once teeming with life, to an inert sponge that does nothing more than soak up and expel chemicals. Grass lawns are nice. But the biological effect of the way most of us maintain them is the equivalent, on a microscopic scale, of a scorched-earth policy. Thus most of our green lawns are, paradoxically, actually biological deserts.

 

The patch of grass where the Seniors and I intended to put our vegetable garden was no exception. When we first stuck a shovel into it, we found that it consisted of highly compacted clay. Even with the sharp edge of a spade, it was difficult to move. Below the roots of the green grass, we fond a material that most of us would associate with pottery: chocolate-brown, semi-dry, and barely pliable, so thick that a worm literally could not dig through it. We knew this for certain because, in the six weeks that we spent digging out our garden beds, we found only a single, solitary worm. On those warm, humid September afternoons, we should have found dozens in each shovelful. But this earth had been biologically scorched. Worms were absent there not only because the ground had been compacted nearly into concrete, but because there was nothing left living in it on which the worms could feed.

 

And digging out these beds, getting air and light into the dirt, was only part of the strategy we’d need to restore life to the ground and assure that whatever we planted there would actually grow. The other part was compost. Compost is, as the British horticulturalist Monty Don puts it, “the alchemy of the garden.” By piling up a mixture of nitrogen-rich waste, like brown leaves and shredded vocabulary quizzes, and carbon-rich waste like apple cores and banana peels, you can create a substance that, with time and water, will break down into a black, autumnal loam that is the ultimate fertilizer. It really is that simple. As long as you get the mixture right and stir the pile regularly, the microorganisms and earthworms that are naturally drawn to such piles will break them down into a substance that, when used as a mulch in a garden, will kickstart life in its soil from the surface down. 

 

Making our own composting center was stupidly easy. A few students drove down to a local farm and grabbed some free palates. Once they bought these back, we found a shady spot (this sort of compost pile should always go in shade) and zip-tied them together into a series of bays. After that, we put small collection bins into our cafeteria and student lounges, made a few announcements in homeroom about what should and should not be composted, then started placing what we collected into the first bay. 

 

Autumn turned to winter and the pile froze hard as a rock. You couldn’t even stick the tines of a pitchfork into it. The students told me it looked like nothing but a heap of garbage. I told them to wait. Compost is, among other things, a signal that not everything with which we interact on an average day is as simple as it seems. As it turns out, almost nothing is as complex as a spoonful of dirt, which literally contains a cosmos. 

 

Then one day in spring I was helping a student stir some apple cores into the pile. She thrust the pitchfork into the mound and peeled back a forkful. Steam shot out of it like smoke from a fire. We both laughed like kids. The engine of life had restarted. And it was running hot.   

 

–Alex Miller, Jr.