The update for July will get rolled into August’s look at our garden. It seems a fitting time to do it. Early August is about halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. In the distant past, this time was known as Lammas or Lughnasadh, a pagan celebration of the beginning of the harvest. I always feel that day in August when the sun starts to turn and the light feels heavier, slower almost, and I know the harvest months are upon us.
In the past, our garden has been primarily vegetables and our harvest season has begun in August with cucumbers and the first tomatoes. Then some of the root vegetables come in. The beets and carrots get pulled and we get to marvel over their colors.
This year, our garden has been scaled back and consists mostly of flowering perennials that we hope will attract a plethora of pollinators and other critters. I shared my wish list of garden critters in our previous garden update, in June.
Our July and early August were filled with many garden visitors, some from my list and others that I have written of before.
Here are some of the bumblebee pictures I managed to get. The first, with the red band, is on our prairie sunflower. The second, yellow and black, is on the purple coneflower, and the third, also yellow and black, takes a liking to our borage. In addition to these, I also caught a few glimpses of an all-black variety of bumblebee which moved far too quickly for photos. Maybe one day!
I cannot describe how happy it makes me to see bumblebees in our garden. In previous years, I have found them few and far between in garden visits and most of the bee sightings were regular honeybees on our salvia. Definitely not a bad thing to me, but bumblebees feel more magical and cartoonish. They are entertaining to watch and beautiful to study. 10/10
Here are pictures of an iridescent green bee, which I believe to be the metallic green sweat bee, Agapostemon texanus. These have also been showing up more frequently in our garden this year and I thought they were going to be scarce. These are beautiful bees to watch in person and they are amazingly fast. I had to sit still in front of these flowers for several minutes before they happened to land and I got these photos. Worth it.
Here are some other varieties of bee that seem to love our prairie sunflowers. They range in size from miniscule to about the size of a honeybee. From what I can assume, these may be carpenter or mason bees in addition to others I have yet to learn about. Several of them have made homes in the fenceposts by our garden (pictured below). I want to continue to build up the variety of insects that visit our garden but I feel this year has already been a success when compared to other years.
There have also been other critters visiting our garden, the birds! I got to strike another entry off my list, the beautiful goldfinch. In the evening, I heard something which I thought was a mouse squeaking furiously. When I turned the corner, I spotted a pair of goldfinches perched on our prairie sunflowers. Every year around this time, our sunflowers draw the goldfinches in and feed them as they pass through. It is always an honor to be a part of their migratory patterns and to see their little yellow bodies flit from the flowers to the nearby trees when you try to catch a glimpse. Like little phantoms in the corner of your eye. When you get to watch them in action, it really is special.
We have also been getting a red-tailed hawk in our area, perhaps drawn in by the mice that like to make a house in our garden shed. The hawk is sizeable and prominent wherever they decide to perch and getting close enough for a picture can be a practice in patience. In person, they are much more noble and majestic.
Our garden, which in June was just a collection of green in a bundle of tightly-wound leaves, has been bursting with colors. The yarrow, coneflowers, sunflowers, borage, and black-eyed susans have all bloomed and done their goodwork attracting pollinators. Morning glory and moonflowers open each morning supported by the tall sunflowers or drooping over our fence. Goldenrod has exploded in yellow — pictured here in our neighbor’s garden. But the salvia and the chamomile are on their way out, forming seedheads and turning brown. The sedum autumn joy is just about to begin its blooming, signalling the start of fall. Even in the midst of the summer heat, the next season is palpable and waiting.
The summer heat, the flowers, the garden, and the world of fascinating insects that arrives each year brings a flood of happiness and contentment for me. In the beginning of the harvest season, I get reflective on a time of unbridled enthusiasm and nonstop activity. Everyone is up and doing something, and you feel drawn into the life of these most open and inviting months. But there is also a soft spot in my heart for the fall, for the big harvests and cooler nights, for the slowing of time and the diminishing of the daylight. Things become quiet and thoughtful and you get to immerse yourself again in the joy of planning next year’s garden while still in the abundance and happiness of this year’s.
I hope you have enjoyed this brief tour of our garden during this, the beginning of the harvest season. Stay cool for the rest of August, and happy gardening. Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: Although I am always working toward it, I am currently a professional in nothing and an amateur in many things. At the end of the day, I am simply someone who likes to write and to garden. Always do your own research or seek out guidance from professionals doing goodwork in their field.
Ruth Stout is famous in the world of gardening for her “No-Work” methods, explained in delightful prose in several of her books. Her gardening titles include “How to have a green thumb without an aching back”, and “Gardening without work”. Her character and her simple approach to daily living comes out clearly in her writing and she makes no effort to add unnecessary frills or digressions with her ideas. In her writing, just as in her gardening, Ruth was straightforward, no-nonsense, and a little playful with her dry sense of humor.
One of the things I appreciate most about Ruth Stout is her interesting and roundabout path through life. She is not one of those individuals you might see in popular biopics today who find an obsession early on and dedicate their entire lives to it. Instead, she spent a large portion of her life doing all sorts of odd jobs before even finding gardening for the first time. It took her even longer to start writing about it. Her list of professions included “a baby nurse, a bookkeeper, a secretary, a business manager, and a factory worker.” She even owned a tea-shop at one point and at another time worked for a fake mind-reading act. This is the kind of work history that transcends all résumé workshops or neatly labeled boxes. It is real and intricate and tells a story of a varied and interesting past.
She started gardening at the age of 45, using conventional methods that included plowing and fertilizing. Frustrated by the timelines and labor of traditional methods, Stout decided to forego the plowing, the fertilizing, and the application of “poison sprays” for pests and instead decided to sow her seeds in the soil as it was, covering the garden in a layer of deep mulch. This was the beginning of what would become the “Stout System” and would be the topic of her most popular books.
Stout continued to write and garden in this way, leaving ample free time to other pursuits and interests with all the time and work she managed to cut out of her gardening. She makes claims in an interview of never having to “plow or spade or cultivate or weed or hoe or use fertilizer or use a poison spray or a compost pile or water.” If that isn’t compelling enough, she also bragged that she hadn’t stepped foot in a supermarket in years and supplied all the fresh produce she and her husband needed for the entire year, freezing any surplus. All of this work, according to Ruth, was done after a leisurely breakfast and before 11 o’clock.
Stout is an enduring example of an individual who has found the ‘golden mean’ of work, leisure, simplicity, and enjoyment. In a way, she seems to embody both the Stoic ideal of never letting anything bother her and the Epicurean ideal of cultivating joy and pleasures, in her own and others’ lives. She passed at the age of 96, in the year 1980.
I write about her here as an inspiration for my own approach to work, longevity, and a spirited approach to life’s difficulties. She is not only inspiring in a gardening capacity but is an example of the type of character we could cultivate. She liked to end her declarations with the phrase ‘why not?’ which seems to summarize her attitude in her laconic way. In her older years, her back was bent as she did her work in the garden. She was witness to many difficult times, as we all are at some point in our lives, and yet she still kept that same wry humor and unbothered outlook about her. She reminds me of someone I would be related to – perhaps because she is from Kansas, as my mother’s family was. An old prairie personality, filled with life’s wisdom and the grit of independence and simplicity.
Stout immediately reminds me of Masanobu Fukuoka, a farmer I’ve written about on this page before. He also preached a simplistic approach to agriculture and ruthlessly did away with any conventional method that involved complication of the basic process of growing food. Fukuoka’s approach is geared toward larger-scale farming while Stout’s main work is in gardening – her own plot being 45’x50’ – but the ideas are the same. They both look at the process at hand and ask themselves, “What can I get rid of, how can I make this easier and more simplistic?”
Fukuoka’s approach is labeled as “Do-Nothing” farming while Stout’s is labeled “No-Work”. Naturally, you can see them as approaching things in the same spirit. Oddly enough, this does not mean lazy indifference or wasted time, for either Stout or Fukuoka. Both of them stayed busy while reducing their workload, focusing more energy on their creative outlets, community connections, housekeeping, and personal projects. Do-Nothing and No-Work, then, seem to be misnomers or are at the very least misleading. Both are, at their centers, methods of reducing unnecessary tasks and difficult work in order to get more enjoyment out of work and to have more time for things that are important. Fukuoka also lived into his nineties, passing at 95. There’s something to this lifestyle, I’m tellin’ ya! (To learn more about Masanobu, click this link https://goodworkalmanac.com/2026/04/13/masanobu-fukuoka/)
Stout’s own approach to work was constantly put to this analysis – if the end goal is not worthwhile and the task itself can be gotten rid of with no harm, then the benefit to the individual is whatever they can do with this newly freed up time. In economics this can be called opportunity cost. Stout’s cost/benefit analysis comes from the observation that things are often made more complicated and arduous than they need to be, without that much increased benefit to show for it. This does not always come down to dollars and cents calculations but can also be calculated through the lens of time and effort. Because time and effort are not immediately coming out of one’s bank account, it is sometimes easy to write them off as having little value. In her own words, “people often go ahead and do these things without thinking.”
This brings us to another aspect of Stout’s outlook on life we could all stand to cultivate. She did not have much unquestioned respect for living life by the standards of other people. She made a point to say that we should not order our lives (or our gardens) by the standards of other people. Being this humble, she was even surprised when people followed her advice without much forethought. She made sure to add the disclaimer to her works that these are the things which have worked for her and that each person should try to figure things out as suits them. In her book, “Gardening Without Work”, she wonders why people would want to impose a bunch of rules on others, and she expresses that, not understanding this approach, she would never accept the standards of another person without first rigorously questioning them. I think this is wisdom to take with us into all aspects of our lives.
What I mean when I mention the Epicurean and Stoic ideals – in modern discourse, the term ‘Epicurean’ is sometimes thrown around as meaning a desperate consumption of temporary pleasures. Epicureanism was, in actuality, a system of ideas aimed at the cultivation of simple joys and pleasures with the ultimate goals of ataraxia (tranquility) and aponia (absence of discomfort or pain). Stoicism is also mislabeled, at times, as being cold, repressed, or completely detached from emotion. In reality, Stoicism was the practice of cultivating virtue and resilience in spite of the vacillations and uncertainties of people and of life in general.
Ruth Stout fits perfectly in both camps, if you ask me, and demonstrates an idea that these are not disparate or antagonistic philosophies but are two sides of the same coin of experience, of what it means to be human. Ruth makes a point to say that she has always had the ‘useful’ thought come to her first, before the harmful one. This has made her especially resilient in dealing with life’s difficulties. And in her daily life, she often had a small drink of wine or gardened in the nude, indulged in her leisurely breakfasts and cut out needless complexity if it got in the way of enjoying herself.
As for her gardening methods, I have always been a proponent of deep mulch to reduce the need for weeding and watering. When I come up against a task in my work and in my gardening, I wonder if it can’t be dispensed with – not as a means of shirking the work that needs to be done but as a journey toward the mastery of simplicity. I do not weed or hoe or fertilize if I can help it, and I definitely do not use pesticides as they can interrupt or negatively impact beneficial insect life. I follow what methods and pointers I can from her system and adjust things otherwise as they need to be. Ruth Stout’s practical wisdom, even if it is not perfectly replicated, can follow you into every area of your life and infect you with her spirit of joy and tenacity.
I would encourage everyone to watch her interview which I can link here, as well as read any of her books. They are as entertaining as they are informative.
Disclaimer: Although I am working toward it, I am currently a professional in nothing and an amateur in many things. At the end of the day, I am simply someone who likes to write and to garden. Always do your own research or seek out guidance from professionals doing goodwork in their field.
As a younger man just getting my start in the world of work, I found myself wanting more structure and consistency than I was used to having. I had just finished a modified trade school experience amid the covid lockdowns and there was still a lot of uncertainty – there would be a lingering sense of it for quite some time. Not knowing what to do with my undeveloped welding skills, I got the first decent job I could find in manufacturing.
At the time, I was living in the basement room of a house I shared with two roommates. I desperately wanted better but was happy to have my basic needs met. Each day, I went into work to spool cables and solder connector pins. It was not glamorous, but it wasn’t the horrific stress and strain I thought manufacturing would be, either. There were many nice people and even some friends to be had there. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was wasting my time. I was impatient for a better life in which I had the resources I needed to enjoy myself, to pursue meaningful goals, to create projects and art, to travel and meet people, to provide opportunities for others and to help them when I could. But I felt stuck, dragging myself into work each morning to continue the same drudgery as the day before. It never let up and it never meant anything more. I wondered how to get out.
I started to listen to the sayings and proverbs of Poor Richard’s Almanac, written by Ben Franklin, while I worked on my cables. Maybe it was the sayings themselves or the soothing voice reading them but for whatever reason, they brought me great comfort. They would talk about work, money, time, or virtue and I was slowly convinced that these messages represented the way forward. I wanted structure and consistency and here were these proverbs preaching just that. I wanted a plan to move forward, to get out, and these one-or-two-line sayings helped me take the first steps. Below are some of the lessons I learned from the sayings of Ben Franklin, collected from Poor Richard’s Almanac.
“Do you love life? then don’t squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”
Poor Richard’s sayings about time are geared toward encouraging productive activity. It is painfully true that we only have a limited time allotted to each of us. He encourages us, “To be up and be doing and doing to the purpose.” The idea is to find your purpose and to use your time as efficiently and as wisely as you can. I wanted that daily trip into work to mean something, I wanted those forty hours of work to work for me. I realized that how I spent my time would deeply affect the trajectory of my life. The paycheck I got every two weeks represented eighty hours of my life that I had exchanged and I wasn’t going to let it be for nothing.
This may be more relevant than ever with the tools we have at our disposal to waste our time in ever more ingenious ways. With our wasted time, could we learn an instrument, a second language? Could we write a book, play a sport, connect with community? There is always a minute here or there that will be wasted or lost to distractions, but the point is to find your focus again and to take up the responsibility of using your time productively –whatever that means for you and your specific purpose.
It is at this point we must understand a kind of paradox. We want to live today because tomorrow is not promised to us, but we must act as if tomorrow is promised if we are to make the best decisions today.
Every day I went into that dead-end job, I felt I was wasting my time. I wanted to live now. What if all the time I had left was wasted going to work, doing these pointless things? But I also realized that in order to build a life that included all the wonderful things I wanted – travel, connection, creativity – I had to believe in the future first and begin to build a life that looked nothing like my dream in order to eventually attain it. In short, I began to believe in effort, patience, and productivity. Though I still struggle with these things, I have made them a practice of my daily work.
Lesson Two: Work can be a wonderful – and helpful – part of your life.
Poor Richard’s admonitions usually include some mention of industry or hard work. He constantly reassures us of the ability of our work to sustain our lives — “Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee.”
Our relationship to work can become somewhat murky and impersonal. Work can also be an integral part of life, meaning it is integrated into your life, rather than kept at arm’s length. In the past, a craft was so deeply personal that someone’s surname was their profession, and they taught their children and their children’s children their craft, weaving it into the identity of generations.
It is more common nowadays to have an ambivalent or even negative relationship towards one’s work. For many now, work is just some place they go to in order to pay the bills. Resentment can build toward work when you have no intentional relationship with it.
I would say it is a rare case that someone will find their most meaningful work right off the bat. For many of us, we will have to wade through several years of dead-end or pointless jobs to make ends meet before we find a mission or calling that inspires us to pursue something greater. I started working in a movie theater at sixteen. I have been a painter, a plumber, a grocery clerk, a nomad farmer. I have worked in manufacturing for several years. It has all continued to develop the skills I need to do the work I really want to do. The moment where everything clicks still eludes me, but I work toward that every day.
Even after this click occurs, it can be quite some time before you feel effective and competent enough in your work for it to be truly rewarding. But the point is to seek this out. I have known many who wallow in their pointless jobs until they retire. They make sure to remind you that they are not where they want to be. But they also don’t do anything to work toward a more purposeful calling. Their association with work is that it is terrible, something to avoid, and they never pursue a work that can help them fulfill their potential while also providing meaning and order for others. “The trade must be worked at and the calling well-followed,” Poor Richard says.
As I mentioned, I wanted work to mean something and that means coming away from it having gained more than I’ve lost. I had lost time and energy that I would have rather put towards other things but that meant I wasn’t going to let my gain be for nothing. At times, I denied the things I wanted briefly in order to work towards the things I wanted the most. I followed Poor Richard’s wisdom, “It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.” No small contribution to my eventual success was going to be scoffed at, or, as Poor Richard says, “Many a little makes a nickel.”
The path is not straightforward or easy but with consistency, we can begin to make our moves.
Lesson Three: Consistency will take you where heroic effort can’t.
Huge undertakings and overnight successes can be enticing concepts to those who have much ambition and not enough patience. You want to work eighty hour weeks, make a massive return on a penny stock, win the lottery, strike it rich. The consistency and patience of daily work can hardly be made to be romantic compared with the richness and aesthetic of the overnight success. But the possibilities of consistency are always far greater than the short-lived win. They are certainly greater than waiting for luck to come save us.
Once again, Poor Richard’s world involved plain, regular people making a life for themselves and for others. Many of his sayings preach patience, contentment, and consistency as the means to attain the good life.
It is part of the Goodwork philosophy that we must find work that appeals to our nature and our purpose in order to live a fulfilled life. In this philosophy, work is not merely a means to an end, it is not something you use just to get enough money in order to do what you really want. Work should be a purposeful and meaningful act which allows you to express something deeply personal about yourself and your relationship to the world. And when that is not available, we should be steadily working to get to that point.
I knew if I quit that awful job, I would find myself in another one not long after. As long as I refused to engage with the inconvenience of work I did not like, I would never have the resources or skills to find the work that was meant for me. I looked to the summit of the mountain, but I had no respect for the first steps, so I never moved. I wanted to fall into my ideal rather than work up to it. Having found respect for the process, one can begin to move within its channels. But we must be content to be beginners, humbled by new experiences every day, in order to attain to the level of masters.
I am a huge fan of any philosophy that includes some element of continual improvement. Why? Because goals, aspirations, and ambition that swell beyond actionable steps can actually demotivate you and cause you to disengage from the work that could be accomplished now. This initial work is inevitably linked to the end goal, a goal which may be massive, and they are connected by a thread called continual improvement. We have to learn to be okay with being beginners. We have to believe that any progress is good progress. We have to believe that we have a hand in our future, that we have the power to continually improve our circumstances so that we may do the most meaningful work we can. For ourselves as well as for others, we make the slow trudge of consistent effort. Or, as Poor Richard says, “Vessels large may venture more but little boats should stick near shore.”
Poor Richard sends a message throughout his collection of wisdom to be steady, settled, and careful in your daily business. This involves attention to detail and diligence in attending matters that we sometimes have impatience or disdain for. For it is true, “a small leak will sink a great ship.”
Work hard, don’t spend more than you make, and use your time wisely. As you can see, these lessons are the same basic lessons we have always known and the same lessons we have always had to relearn as time goes on. While today we may have several schemes or hacks for going about these goals, Ben Franklin through his pseudonym Poor Richard, preached virtues like diligence, frugality, and industry as intentional, daily practices that would do more for people than their short-lived schemes. While I was certainly impatient when I was younger, I realize now that the best accomplishments come from the long game, the committed endurance of an entire life.
For those who are interested, all of Poor Richard’s sayings have been collected in a work called ‘The Way to Wealth’ by Benjamin Franklin. I will include a link here.
Disclaimer: Although I am working toward it, I am currently a professional in nothing and an amateur in many things. At the end of the day, I am simply someone who likes to write and to garden. Always do your own research or seek out guidance from professionals doing goodwork in their field.
I cannot think of a more tedious and wasteful chore than the upkeep of the typical lawn. Personally, I have always detested the work required to maintain a lawn and have somehow been roped into caring for one in some form or another since I was a kid. Pushing a lawnmower around in the summer heat, watering on a schedule, fertilizing, weeding, troubleshooting dead or dying grass with any number of issues. And for what? The fruit tree bears fruit and the lawn gives us work, that is all it does.
While this is meant as a how-to, I have inadvertently begun this article as a why-to. For me and for many others, there are ample reasons to get rid of a part of (or the entirety of) your lawn. 65% of homeowners now prefer a lower maintenance yard. And there are promising trends in the percentage of people investing in sustainable or edible gardens, pollinator gardens, as well as drought-tolerant plants and landscape designs.
There are some other promising and useful statistics out there as to the incentives to replacing a lawn. Sufficient landscaping can reduce the heat of an area anywhere from 5-10 degrees. Native plants use 50-75% less water than turfgrass, landscaping mulch can prevent erosion, and xeriscaping saves 50-70% on water bills. Native landscaping cuts pesticide use by 80%. Bird-friendly landscaping can increase bird populations 40%.
There’s a lot there to unpack, and some incentive for just about anybody. Lawns can cost some real dough – the average family spends about $500 per year on landscaping services but that does not factor in time and energy spent by the average American taking care of their own lawn or yard, not to mention the amount of money spent on water, tools, and materials if one would do this work themselves. Switching to a lower maintenance yard can save money, and that money saved year after year after year is going to mean the kind of green you can really get enthusiastic about!
If you are interested in being a part of the natural landscape and being involved in the wildlife of your area, then you’ve got all the motive in the world! Helping bugs and birds thrive, making your yard more habitable to everything (including YOU), and being able to enjoy the beauty of a cultivated but wild landscape that bursts with color and life. Sounds like a dream!
Elements to include when replacing your lawn
Flat and green. Low-maintenance ground covers can be drought-tolerant, foot traffic tolerant, require little mowing or none at all, and can still provide the blank canvas for activity that a lawn is typically sought out for. Families with children who want a large, open area to play in seem to gravitate toward flat groundcovers that still look healthy and feel comfortable on the bare foot, should the need arise.
For low maintenance groundcovers, I would recommend the gardener to look into blue star creeper, Corsican mint, veronica, clover, or creeping thyme. These grow very low to the ground and require little to no maintenance, can be tolerant to foot traffic, and even have little blossoms that can be a pretty addition to a lawn which grasses do not provide. Preferences will decide which would be most suitable to your landscape and climate, as well as your personal taste in aesthetic. Mixing and matching could create a neat patchwork of different smells, textures, and appearances that would make your lawn even more interesting.
Rocks. I think the strategic use of rocks in landscaping can add interesting texture and naturalistic aesthetics to the yard. But when they are used incorrectly, they can add a lot of headache and extra work. I have seen people spread rocks over the entire surface of their yard, acting as a mulch. The issue with this is that rocks make reworking the landscape much more difficult. If you need to access irrigation or replace older plants, you are in for quite the chore moving layers of rock whereas a true mulch is lightweight and easy to work with.
Another issue with rock as a mulch is that it absorbs heat, often making your yard or garden noticeably hotter and more uncomfortable during the afternoon or early evening hours, when you are most likely to be in your yard or garden. Many people think that putting down weed barrier or landscaping cloth then covering it with rock will be a great way to prevent weeds and reduce their need to water. While this certainly does reduce the need to water, weed seeds will still accumulate in the nooks and crannies between rocks and will sprout on top of the weed barrier and grow well with relatively little material for their roots to grow in – I mean, these are weeds, there’s a reason they are hard to get rid of: they grow really well in just about anything! Then you will be forced to kneel down in the rock mulch (ouch) while it radiates its heat (oof) as you pick through layer after layer of rock to pull the weeds out (yikes).
If your goal is to reduce weeds and watering, I would recommend filling your landscape with native plants and a deep mulch of some lightweight material. The native plants will not require much watering, if chosen for your climate, and the deep mulch will retain more moisture and reduce weeds while feeding the soil as it degrades.
As for the proper use for rocks, I would recommend using them sparingly to outline beds, separate different slopes to prevent erosion, or to accent natural features. When used with the other elements listed here, they can provide a lot of different benefits to a varied and interesting garden.
Native plants. Obviously, this was going to be mentioned several times in this post. The interest in lower maintenance or sustainable gardening is on the rise and native plants are the mainstay of these new gardens. They are naturally adapted to your environment and so require the conditions that are readily available in your area – they do not need extra care or extra labor to thrive. There are so many different types to choose from that the combinations are nearly endless. Flowering perennials are my favorite, as I love to watch them return in the spring to signal the end of another long winter, and then to follow their progress through the season. I love to see them grow tall, flower, attract insects and birds, and finally to fade and decorate the landscape once more in the fall. But you can also spread seeds of annuals in the spring and watch them burst into life.
You can grow just for greenery. You can choose your plants so that something is always in bloom throughout the year. You can attract specific types of wildlife if you do a little research to see what they like to eat or where they like to make their homes. Something will always grow in the garden, whether weed or flower, why not choose what grows and make it something useful, productive, and beautiful?
Water features. This is a landscaping element that often gets left out of the garden plan. But if your goal is to attract all sorts of life to your garden, you’ll want some type of water feature. You can start fairly cheap with bird baths or basins or introduce a pump and some power to make flow. Building a shallow pond could provide the habitat for a frog’s entire lifecycle, or the breeding grounds for dragon flies, damsel flies, and a dozen other insects.
Edible landscapes. Nowadays, I get caught up in the perennials and the habitat aspects of gardening but it wasn’t long ago that I focused almost entirely on productive edible gardening. For most people, when they hear gardening they think of vegetable gardens. I would love if one day I could have thousands of square feet for gardening fruits and vegetables but right now I content myself with what I can grow in my containers.
An edible garden doesn’t have to be your main source of food or even very serious, it can be a handful of heirloom tomato plants because you like the taste of fresh summer tomatoes, or pumpkins because you like to watch them vine. Many people have found joy in raising a vegetable garden and harvesting delicious food, along with raising chickens or goats in their yards too. Having an edible landscape is nice because it reminds you of your intimate link with nature. Food does not come from a shelf or a bag, it must be grown. Whatever one can do to increase their relationship with this process, it does something to help with mind and spirit.
Trees in your landscape can reduce ambient temperatures and create a pleasant atmosphere while providing habitat for local birds and insect life. Mulch can increase soil moisture and lessen your water bill. Water features will attract all sorts of life from all around. But at the end of the day, make sure to provide a space and habitat for that one elusive creature that keeps the garden going year after year – you! Plan walkable paths, beautiful aesthetics, relaxing corners, and mobility-friendly plans that do not put a huge strain on your body. Raised beds can reduce your need to stoop or bend. The right tool can reduce your work by half and make it more enjoyable in the meantime. Make sure you can easily gain access to any part of the yard or garden that you would like to interact with or work on. And whatever you decide to do for your yard and garden, make sure it is something you care about and have a passion for, something that you are excited to see in the morning and tend to in the evenings.
My yard is around 900 square feet. Because it is a rental, it is part lawn and part gravel. If it was my yard, I would plant two or three trees, some flowering shrubs, build ten or so raised beds for vegetables and then border the fence with all sorts of perennials. I would have a small pond for frogs, toads, insects, and birds. Maybe some bird feeders and houses for the odd robin that wants to make this their home. I like to imagine what a space could be and to imagine the changes I could make to the wildlife in the area, as well as to my own wellbeing. It would feel good to take a barren yard and to create a little oasis. These are the things I love, what kind of yards and gardens do you love? Make it your own!
Driving by the irrigation ditches in the countryside, you see them pop up out of the grass, open their otherworldly flowers, and sag in late summer with their seed pods. Milkweed grows in the most unassuming and difficult spots. And I would see them mowed down or pulled out of the edges of people’s landscaping and it felt like a kind of insult. Something so weird and spectacular and thriving in the most difficult circumstances, cut down without a second thought. The world must go on but we don’t have to be anything like the world. I love milkweed and I want to cultivate it as widely as I can. I want to sow its seeds in the soil of the mind.
Milkweed is the primary source of food for the Monarch butterfly in their caterpillar stage. The black, yellow, and white striped caterpillars are beautiful to behold and seem made for milkweed as a natural pair of alien creatures. The Monarch’s numbers dwindle and struggle with continued loss of habitat and its main host plant, the lovely milkweed.
This is where we may enter, if we wish. A long time ago, I noticed a tenacious milkweed plant setting its strange-looking seed pods at the edge of a field butting up against my vegetable garden. In the beginning of winter, I took a seed pod and opened it to collect the seeds. I spread them in the field and in the garden. I took some home to winterize them, a practice called ‘cold-stratifying’. In the spring, I planted the seeds and hoped they would flourish.
If you decide to undertake this project with me, be careful when handling any part of the milkweed plant. They exude chemicals which can really irritate your skin and eyes. I knew this in theory but still learned the hard way when handling the seeds. Don’t repeat my mistake!
The plants sprouted and rose to about five or six inches tall. I was elated. Then the heat of late summer hit, they didn’t grow much more, and the first frosts of fall came with no promises for next season. When the following spring came (this spring, 2026), I waited for the first signs of milkweed coming up. I was pleasantly surprised to see a handful had survived the dry winter.
We did not get as many as we would have liked but it was a blessing even to get a few in our garden. As stated in previous posts, I would be ecstatic if we got a Monarch to visit our garden and would be surprised if they selected our garden to lay their eggs but we still keep hope alive.
Monarch butterflies will overwinter in Mexico and then migrate North during the summer months, searching for milkweed on which to lay eggs. I have not personally seen them use any milkweed plants in our area but that is also because the plants are few and far between.
The goal of this project is to spread the milkweed plant in order to cultivate more breeding grounds for the Monarch. It is a project I hold dear and which is in its initial stages, to be frank. I have about three clumps of milkweed in my garden and cannot do much more, as I rent my current living space. I figure every little bit helps for now but I dream of one day being able to plant whole fields of milkweed and to witness the Monarch migration and to be part of it in some humble way. I also wanted to spread awareness and invite others to be part of the project as well.
There are many resources online to assist in this aim. You can order milkweed seeds online or get them from local vendors. There are several types of milkweed to select from. Showy Milkweed and Common Milkweed are the most frequently recommended for growers in North America, though do your research as to the types which are native to your area or would thrive the best in your climate.
Adult monarchs also need nectar, meaning other plants can be valuable in their lifecycle as well. Blanketflower, aster, and many types of Goldenrod can provide nectar for the adult butterflies, while your milkweed provides a home and food for the larvae. Avoid using insecticides and other chemicals that may damage the lifecycle of insects in your garden.
One may also spread milkweed seeds in marginal spaces or wild areas. I take pleasure in my evening walks when I pass by a few milkweed plants that thrive in the stone borders of a neighbor’s yard, just outside their fence. No one seems to mind their presence and they are typically allowed to grow to maturity throughout the season.
I always keep my eye out for any Monarchs that may use these as a home for their larvae. And I hope nobody cuts them down, taking them for a nuisance weed. We focus on what we can control. Adding a few clumps of milkweed to our gardens may not seem like much but if many people did this, there would be many potential sites for a Monarch to choose from. Every little bit helps.
I will continue to document the efforts of Project Milkweed in future posts and will, of course, provide updates if a Monarch chooses our garden as a home. This is one of those long term projects that takes place over the course of a lifetime. Each year I hope to do a little more and to bear witness to the growth of it.
We have arrived at the longest day of the year once again. With this and other astronomical events, I have always enjoyed a meditative pause on the passage of time, the slow evolution of the season, and the deepest expressions of nature that pour out of every corner of the landscape and become like recognizable features of a close friend. You can get to know them and see their moods and traits returning each year and you can celebrate them and love them. This year is no different. We celebrate the longest day, bask in the generous helping of summer light that we are given, and meditate on what this means in itself as well as what it means for the months to follow.
As I look around the landscape, it is overflowing with lush, green foliage that felt almost impossible just four months ago. The longer days give themselves to an abundance of activity and you can see it in the faces of the people you pass in the street. We are all going somewhere, doing more and planning more, overwhelmed with the possibility a day holds which in winter was only a hope. Getting off of work in the dark does not really add to one’s motivation but when the sun is out until nearly nine o’clock, suddenly the day takes on so much added possibility, you are inclined to take advantage of the extra time. We may never think of it consciously but our internal clock, the wisdom of our bodies, remembers the cold and dark nights that last so long in December and January. It is urging us to explode with as much life as the landscape in which we find ourselves.
It is important to stop and note this longest day, as it will soon recede into late summer evenings, and then the crisp days of fall and finally, like a rising tide, the winter will come again. On some level, we must remember how constraining the winter can be so that we can more fully enjoy this summer season. Here we stand on the precipice and then we begin our descent again. It is a time filled with meaning and passion, here for us to act upon if we wish.
Nature provides us with many relevant metaphors for the living of our own lives and this season is no different. I looked around the garden the other day and realized an important truth about gardening and life in the midst of June: everything is overgrown and almost heavy with life and yet this pinnacle of light, the solstice, cannot be considered the end goal of all this abundant growth. It is almost as if this outpouring of growth is the construction of an intricate background which will decorate the stage on which the real activity will begin to play itself out. Growth is not the goal. Growth alone cannot be called fulfillment or purpose. Growth plays toward the fulfillment of some purpose outside of itself.
Imagine a fruit tree which becomes dense with new branches and leaves in the spring and is thickly covered over with this life in midsummer. How ridiculous it would be to assume that this was the endgame of all its efforts. Of course, we can say, this is only really the beginning of its effort to set flower and fruit, to become full and heavy by late summer and fall, to strive toward that all-out expression called the harvest. The attainment of perfect expression for a flower is its open blossom, not the thicket of greenery it produces in late spring. All of its effort in unfurling its leaves is effort towards attainment beyond itself.
Growth is not fulfillment. There is a distinct difference between growth in certain areas of your life and finding purpose and fruition in these areas. The difference can be seen in the separation of quantitative measures of success and qualitative measures of success. You may have a lot of money – this is quantitative success. But what are you able to do with it? This would be a qualitative answer. You find yourself overwhelmed with activity and surrounded by relationships but what meaning do they create, where are they going? You build muscle in the gym, maybe lose a certain amount of weight, you can lift XYZ number of pounds in deadlift or squat. But what do you do with your bodily strength and energy? Perhaps you build strength for its own sake but the purpose of strength can be found in some applied good, some purpose outside of itself.
This midsummer, I wanted to meditate on the idea of measuring success qualitatively. We may be used to ascribing a numerical value to our successes because this is the easiest way to measure progress but our progress can also come in how we feel in our daily lives. We can progress in how much we believe in the effectiveness of our effort, how much we believe in our internal locus of control, essentially. The timid and unsure novice attains experience, mistakes, and finally the proof of their success. The evidence of their success may be quantitative but the fact that they proved to themselves that they were capable is a qualitative measure. We could measure our success by the level of independence we have created – perhaps we no longer rely on the day job and we can do more of the things we are truly passionate about.
A huge achievement for many would be creating a life you do not want to escape from. This cannot easily be measured quantitatively, it is a quality of life we must find for ourselves. Doing the same things with much less fear and anxiety is a massive success but a success which is not as easily measured as money in the bank. Some people work tirelessly for tangible wealth while others work to be free from the people their circumstance has forced them to be around. Being able to live your life around the people you most want to spend your time with is a win. It means bliss and success.
Often, we get entranced by convincing others we are doing well rather than pursuing the goal of actually doing well. Proving our success often inherently comes with quantitative measures, as that is the easiest thing for others to see and measure in someone else’s life. How many houses and cars do you own, how many vacations do you take, the list goes on. But the qualitative measures are personal, refined, and difficult to express to someone other than ourselves. Contentment, fulfillment, purpose, a commitment to life, a meaningful connection to others. These can be difficult to measure and difficult to display for others but if you have a trained eye you can recognize it right off.
When you see someone truly living in their purpose, there is a hint of it in every move they make and every word they speak. They live comfortably in the world and in their skin without being affected by others or by circumstance. Their preternatural calm is infectious, their faith in themselves and their abilities dyes every moment with confidence. If you are attuned to this reality, you can see it. If you are not, you will be looking for some sign or quantity with which to measure their success and you will lose yourself to irrelevant calculations.
This is not meant to discard quantitative measures entirely. This is not meant to dismiss growth in all areas of your life as unimportant. Because growth, in us as in the natural world, must precede the deeper expressions we can make of ourselves. As I mentioned earlier, the massive undertaking of growth in spring, at its height in midsummer, sets the stage for the fruition that takes place later. Wealth, strength, influence, connection – growth in these areas is an important prerequisite for qualitative success in other areas. Having resources means having more options, which means having the responsibility of impactful decisions. Having strength and energy means having the ability to do more for others and for yourself, it means developing a larger bandwidth for life, to show up for your relationships and community in ways you would not be able to if you had not developed such a capacity.
The key is not to get caught up in quantitative measures for themselves. This is where shallow obsession with cash comes from. This is where the hyperfixation on GDP and economic growth comes from, separated from wellbeing and standard of living. Steroid abuse, diet trends, quick fix drugs, destructive mentalities tied to impersonal measures of success. The capacity for growth, turned back on itself rather than aimed at a higher purpose, becomes malignant and inhuman. The human world has gotten caught up in the sterile and numerical measures of life and, as such, no qualitative success can develop from it.
On its surface, this may appear to be a strange lesson to learn from the longest day of the year. It feels necessary and relevant. Though we may not consider it, we are still deeply embedded in the ebb and flow of the seasons and the solar year, the movements of nature and its deepest lessons. It still informs our lives though we think we are separate, above it. Looking back to the shortest day, looking ahead to the dwindling light of fall and winter, we find ourselves on the precipice, bathed in light and potential. We take the time and the growth for granted, but we do not have to.
Meditations and Practice
Where in your life have you done well quantitatively? Net worth, athletic achievements, awards and accolades, number of projects completed? Now, what measures of qualitative success can you find? Which seem the most important to you and which would you like to cultivate over the next year, from this longest day to the next? How would you like to feel in the next year and what would you like your life, relationships, and work to look like?
Practice the balance between quantity and quality. Try to make the same or more money (quantity) doing more meaningful work (quality). Try to spend more time (quantity) pursuing goals of connection, awareness, and authenticity (quality). Incorporate more projects or activities in your life which do not have a clear return or measure and see what qualities you can find in them or in yourself which you had not experienced before.
There are so many things happening in our garden in June. It is hard to believe the year is nearly half over. In the late winter and early spring, you think things are taking forever and then June hits and the garden explodes, the days are as long as they’ll get, and you can hardly keep track of all that is happening. I wanted to keep a record of where we are in the garden’s journey and encourage you all to take a closer look at your own gardens and the visitors that come and go throughout the season!
Right now, in the middle of June, we have a few different flowers ready to pop and a handful that have already started blooming. Our salvia comes back year after year without much worry or fuss. In fact, our neighbor tried to replace a beautiful patch of perennials with a sterile rock garden and a few sad looking rose bushes and the old salvia came back with a vengeance. While I have nothing in particular against rock gardens or roses, it was nice to see the old natural garden return for one last victorious flush of purple flowers. The bees love these — as my picture shows! Honeybees are usually one of the first visitors to the garden and salvia is there waiting for them starting early.
Next, we have had several bunches of German chamomile crop up from one seeding several years ago. They are tremendously hardy and self-seed better than other chamomile varieties we have grown. I always appreciate volunteer plants and try my best to protect them and keep them going until they get strong enough to do their own thing. These are usually the plants that end up doing the best in our garden each year.
As a bonus, some lovely ladybugs decided to make our garden their home this year and laid some eggs in our chamomile. We got to see them hatch and the little black larvae crawled all over the garden for a few days. Now they are in chrysalis and soon our garden will be filled with ladybugs (we hope). We think the presence of aphids on our Sedum Autumn Joy may have attracted them.
Then we have our Black-Eyed Susans and our Purple Coneflower (Echinacea) which have returned from last year’s garden, even with the devastatingly dry winter we have had this past year. It just goes to show how resilient and robust these native wildflowers are and what an integral part of any low-effort garden they can be. They have not bloomed yet but the flowers have formed and are just about to open any day now. I cannot wait to see what kind of visitors these flowers bring to the garden. They often attract pollinators of many different types, but more on that later.
In addition to these beauties, we have also had a couple star players return in spite of my almost having killed them (several times). We tried to transplant a few Yarrow plants into our container garden last year and then proceeded to not water them for six months. There was also so little rain or snow this winter, I thought they were dead for sure. Then they came sprouting up with the first wet days of April and May and now they are just about to start blooming. Keep hope alive!
There were also a few sprouts coming up in April that I misidentified as Milkweed but which turned out to be Goldenrod. This was an absolute shock and joy to discover because I must have done everything I could to kill them last season. I transplanted them late and they shriveled up and died where I planted them — their little brown twig bodies reminded me of my failure each day I passed them. Then, this spring when I thought they were Milkweed, I tried to transplant them into a larger container and they soon looked quite sad on our first few hot days in May. Now they are continuing to surprise me and prove their resilience, as they have taken off and look like they are going to be fascinating plants to watch. I have never grown them myself but I am excited to see them. Goldenrod are known to be host plants for a huge variety of insects and wildlife so I will keep my eye on these superstars!
Goldenrod is on the left, Yarrow in the middle, and our Milkweed plants are on the right in this gallery above. Milkweed is known as the sole host plant and food source of the monarch butterfly. I would not hold out hope that a monarch would use our milkweed as their home but that would be high up on my wish list for garden visitors.
Then we have a few of my favorite flowers that I love to see come up each year. They are known to be aggressive self-seeders, and are probably deemed a weed by most people, but I love the Prairie Sunflower. So many insects come to our garden just for these sunflowers and in the later summer I have even seen Goldfinches come to perch on them and feast on their seedheads. It is a lovely sight to behold at the end of the garden season and really connects you to the cycle of the year and the beginning of autumn.
We are also trying Marigold, Nasturtium, Calendula, and native Purple Clover (not a true clover, I believe). These will be beautiful summer and autumn blossoms if the grasshoppers don’t get to them first. I am looking forward to a long season of growing!
I thought I would include in this post a “Garden’s Most Wanted” list as a way to track the garden visitors we get this year. It’s a fun way to stay involved in your garden throughout the year and a reminder that we are part of nature and can make welcoming homes for all sorts of critters without trying very hard. If you’d like to, make your own wish list for garden critters and see what you can find throughout the season — this also makes an enjoyable activity for kids and gets them outside in the dirt. Think of it as a nature-themed scavenger hunt.
GARDEN VISITORS (no particular order)
Monarch Butterfly
Toad or Frog
Bumble Bees
Praying Mantis
Goldfinch bird
Ladybug (check!)
Lacewing
Dragonflies/Damsel Flies
Yellow Garden Spider
Orb Weaver Spider
I’ll leave this list at 10 for now and see how many we can spot in the next few months. Of course I will update with pictures if I spot any and this list is not definitive so I am sure there will be many more entries to make that I am not even thinking of right now. I hope you’ll join me in this fun garden activity and share whatever you find with me.
One of the giants of the “Natural Farming” movement, as well as a proponent of a multitude of valuable nature-based ideas and philosophies, Masanobu Fukuoka embodies several elements which are common to the goodwork archetype.
His dedication to his craft had him traveling the world, helping others implement his ideas, putting his philosophy down in writing, and working on his own farm until the ripe old age of 95. His ideas went so far beyond farming as to be considered a holistic view of the world – one in which humans would be developed in their capacity just as the natural systems Masanobu worked with, and not seen as inherently destructive or irrevocably flawed. Masanobu’s contributions are celebrated worldwide and I would like to shed a light on them today, as part of the continuing series of examples of goodwork.
Born in Japan in 1913, Masanobu Fukuoka became educated in agricultural sciences, working in research in plant pathology. After a disillusionment with modern agricultural practices, he returned to his family farm to practice and experiment with new techniques in natural farming. His farm included citrus orchards as well as rice and barley. Unlike other farms in the area, the fields were not flooded for rice production. This was unusual at the time but Masanobu maintained that his no-till methods, paired with crop rotation and native biodiversity prevented the need for tilling, herbicide and pesticide usage, or even flooding the rice fields.
In 1975, he published his most widely known book, “The One-Straw Revolution” – a book I would recommend to anyone interested in the ideas of natural farming or nature conservation efforts. It is a mixture of how-to guides, spiritual meditation, and philosophical musing over the relationship between human effort and natural ecosystems. There is a tone of hopeful endurance as well as a melancholic exasperation with the state of the world, and even the human spirit. This book provides much fodder for thinking on the continued integration of human and natural systems.
After his book became popular, around 1979, Fukuoka travelled to assist in the work of returning productive as well as natural areas to equilibrium. This work included planting efforts as well as a series of lectures given on the benefits of his methods. He travelled to the U.S., Europe, Somalia, Ethiopia, Thailand, Tanzania, the Philippines, Greece, and China to mention only a few areas he touched.
I find a lot of valuable ideas and inspiration in Masanobu’s work and efforts and I continually return to him as a person of intrigue and emulation. I like to imagine carrying the spirit of his work forward, and to embody his philosophy of nature in all aspects of my own life and work. I would love to work in a purposeful manner up to the age of 95, spreading seeds and inspiring people to return to balance. Included in this article are just a few meditations on the ideas Masanobu frequently discussed.
The Integration of Humans and Nature
“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
This is an idea that has intrigued me for several years. It seems that every animal in nature finds a home, a niche, and a way of being that is intertwined with all the systems of their surroundings. Yet we have so many degrees of separation from natural systems in our modern age. Our homes, our technology, our way of life is at odds with other organisms, ecosystems, and processes that we often find it necessary to completely separate the two ideas. There is ‘our world’ and then, when we find it necessary or interesting, we ‘return’ to nature.
Masanobu Fukuoka’s philosophy entailed people becoming “natural people” again. That is to say, aligning their desires and behavior with natural ways of life. Natural farming, and the cultivation of nature, would not be possible unless people became natural people. As long as people viewed themselves as separate from nature, their behavior would lead them down the path of opposition and conflict with nature.
This separation becomes strikingly apparent when observed through the lens of modern agriculture. In this system, we are dealing in the cultivation of natural organisms – crops, livestock – but we have also gone to great lengths to separate the organism from everything else.
In a natural landscape, each organism is interconnected with every other organism in their ecosystem. Their inputs are someone else’s outputs; their outputs are someone else’s inputs. But in modern agricultural practices, a pig is not even a pig, it is a unit of output, and it is subsequently separated from any other organism through a system of constraints – fences, concrete, confinement houses.
Repeat this for cows, chickens, even crops. No other organism is welcome in the field of a monoculture, and I doubt they’d be met with anything other than hostility if they popped up. To the monoculture, any other plant is considered a weed.
This philosophy leads me to wonder what it would look like if humans were completely integrated into their natural setting like other animals. We would make our homes in our niche, part of nature and contributing to nature. We would find or cultivate our food as part of nature and contributing to nature.
What advantages and disadvantages would this bring? Would it even be possible? Is this an all-or-nothing approach or could we still have technological intervention for disease and injury, some semblance of comfort? Is natural living necessarily hard scrabble living? Is there something in us that makes us act at odds with natural systems, and what type of spiritual evolution would have to take place to reconcile ourselves to the natural world? These are the questions that Masanobu’s work helps to explore; not always to answer, but to explore.
The Do-Nothing Philosophy
“There is no one so great as the one who does not try to accomplish anything.”
Fukuoka’s philosophy was called shizen nōhō. Occasionally, it is translated as ‘Do-Nothing’ farming but this is partially a misnomer, in my opinion. More accurately, it could be called ‘Do Nothing Unnecessary’ farming, as there is still plenty to do in this philosophy.
Fukuoka observed that in modern agricultural practices, people intervened in natural processes when they felt they noticed some inefficiency or disorder. This initial intervention then caused other things to take effect, which required another intervention. Each intervention caused another side effect which was not planned and which required more work, technology, and intervention to correct it. The process seemingly had no end.
When Fukuoka began to practice his natural farming methods, he would often respond to issues by asking himself where he could stop doing something. By cutting back on interventions in natural processes, he found he could make less unnecessary work for himself and let nature accomplish the same ends using its own processes, its own effort. The question of what not to do would, in theory, lead to a final practice where nothing unnecessary is done and the farmer has become a ‘natural person’ whose existence is in harmony with nature’s process.
Let’s take modern agriculture as an example once again. The soil is treated like any other part of this ongoing project – sterilized, standardized, stripped of its life and structure through pesticides, herbicides, and tilling. Then it is desperately tended to via systems of watering and fertilizing. This is a strange setup which seems to contradict its own ends and which makes more work than is necessary. First, the natural processes are minimized, interrupted, or halted entirely because they appear to be inconvenient or counterproductive, then they are mimicked by great interventions of machinery and technology.
I think Fukuoka would ask, “Wouldn’t it be better not to intervene in the first place, and save yourself the work of all these later measures?” Instead of plowing and tilling, robbing the soil of its structure and ability to retain water, and then going back later to irrigate and manage watering systems, why not forego the plowing and the tilling in the first place?
Biodiversity and Balance
“The only sensible approach to disease and insect control, I think, is to grow sturdy crops in a healthy environment.”
The way to begin handing these tasks back to nature was, according to Fukuoka, through biodiversity and finding balance. Nature regulates itself through biodiversity, with different populations of organisms growing and shrinking in relation to hundreds and thousands of others. It is not about ‘achieving’ a state of perfect balance but about allowing processes to work themselves out to find their own stasis. Water will find its own level through the process of waves, movement; nature’s movement is the same.
One of Fukuoka’s initial efforts to return his farm to natural balance was to sow different varieties of seeds and to begin growing many different varieties of crops. When there is a single crop, all in one location, the pests that use this plant as a host find themselves in heaven. But if you begin to separate these plants with other plants, suddenly that same pest does not have the same chance to spread. This is what is meant when we say that nature regulates itself through biodiversity. The greater the mixture of plants and animals, the less likely it will be that explosions of pests and disease will occur.
Economics – Advantages and Disadvantages
The main criticism that is put at the feet of natural farming is that it may not be as economically viable as modern agriculture. It either does not have the same potential for output or it is not cost effective. When we look at it through the eyes of mechanized systems and economies of scale, this is correct. A confinement chicken house is economically successful because all its chickens are grown to be more or less identical – all the better for standardized machinery to process them. And each operation limits itself to one product, as having multiple products increases the cost of processing, requiring different types of machinery and technology for different outputs. You cannot pick strawberries with the same mechanisms with which you pick corn, for example.
But the smallholding does not work in the same way that the large operation works, economically speaking. Its advantages are different than the advantages of a large operation. This is normal. As long as the smallholding does not try to act like a large operation, it can still be successful. By being exactly what it is and capitalizing on its unique advantages, it can still be economically viable.
In this example, the smallholding may not produce as much as the large operation but it also does not have the same machinery costs and overhead costs typical of a large operation. Also, if the smallholding focuses on custom work or retail level sales direct-to-customer, they can increase the amount they get for their products. If they would attempt to achieve the same economies of scale as the large producer, they would take on far too many costs to make their product worthwhile. But keeping costs low and fostering relationships directly with their buyers, they can move in an economically viable way.
I think this method applies to work of other types as well, especially craftwork. Those who do not match pure output still have much quality and value to offer. Often, that is their advantage: they still offer something human, and of high quality, that the large producers cannot mimic in their quest for standardization.
Joel Salatin’s book, “You Can Farm” is also helpful in expounding on this idea. He recommends having a main enterprise and cultivating several side enterprises that are complementary in nature. (This also is in line with the biodiversity idea, applying it even to income streams.)
Meaningful Work and Connection
This brings me to the last lesson, one of connection and humanity. All too often, people decry their work as something that takes them away from life, away from meaningful experience, and provides only an uncomfortable alienation from themselves and from others. In reading about Masanobu Fukuoka’s life and contributions to his field (pun intended), you get the idea that genuine connection and meaningful work are massive forces that still live in us, just under the surface. This man travelled the world because people wanted to meet with him, learn his ways, and connect with him on a personal level over their shared interest and passion.
There will be more posts in the future about the relationship between economics and ecology, as well as work in general, because I find it an interesting path full of questions. But at the very least, we should be able to recognize that we do not have to choose between a good income or meaningful work. We can have both. There is still opportunity to engage in meaningful work in such a way that we can provide massive value to others and receive value through income in our own lives.
If Fukuoka’s example has taught us anything, it is that perhaps we have to do a lot less than we think we do in order to attain this goal. Whether your work is with plants or people, crafts or commodities, we can always take a closer look to understand how our decisions and behaviors can better align with nature. Through our work, we can transform ourselves and our situations so that we can become better, more thoughtful, more productive, less harmful. We can become natural people.
For anyone interested in learning more about Masanobu Fukuoka and his natural farming outlook, I would highly recommend reading “The One-Straw Revolution” or watching interviews and videos available about Fukuoka and his longtime student, Larry Korn. Listening to them and reading their work inspires and educates.
Meditations and Musings
Is there some part of your work you could stop doing? Are there systems or interventions in place that you could get rid of to get to a more efficient and natural work? What do you do that could be considered unnecessary?
What could you do to become a more ‘natural’ person? What role does your work play in developing yourself as a person, physically, spiritually, or mentally? What would your life look like if you made this natural work a part of your daily practice?
Where could you cultivate diversity in your life to make yourself or your income more resilient, more productive, or more natural? What could you incorporate into your life that would complement your main goals, and help you in your effort?
Many people will begin the journey of their life’s work doing something entirely irrelevant to their nature, their goals, and perhaps even their character. I started work at seventeen at my local movie theater, working the concessions counter part-time on evenings and weekends. From what I can recall, I was paid a low wage to get berated by the general public because they made the mistake of ordering movie theater nachos and hotdogs. This was my first encounter with work. And it was not great. It was also where I grew my appreciation for employees in the service industry, a place where brave hearts fear to tread.
Throughout my twenties, I worked a handful of odd jobs. I traveled both Europe and the U.S. working on small farms in exchange for room and board. I worked in a bookstore, as a house painter, as a plumber. I worked one shift as an overnight shelf stocker at my local grocery store before deciding it wasn’t for me. In each job, I felt keenly that I did not belong. Each time I tried something that did not work out, I felt a lot like I was being rejected by the world, like I would never belong anywhere. There was always going to be this friction or resistance when I wanted to pursue some aim.
What’s worse, I looked around and some people were actually passionate about their work. They didn’t drag themselves to their jobs, they didn’t complain about the ins and outs of their profession. They liked to work. And it wasn’t an isolated incident! You could see people working in restaurants, gyms, bookstores, offices, landscaping companies, and they actually wanted to be there. You could see it right off, it was something in their eyes.
I wanted to have what they had, I wanted to do something that I felt connected to, that I could be engaged in. I wanted to make something that had utility, that provided value. I wanted to make something that could provide joy, guidance, and beauty.
In my mid-twenties, I got a job in assembly manufacturing, gluing one part to another part and screwing wires into circuit boards. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was something. It was in this period of my life that I started to change how things were going to be. I had changed my attitude toward my path. I wasn’t going to quit at the first chance and I wasn’t going to let the negative aspects dissuade me from continuing on.
As I was soldering circuits at work one day, I had my first mental glimpse into the future that I wanted to create. Since then, I have realized the various pitfalls common to this process and I have discovered some practices in mental outlook that have helped along the way.
This, by no means, is to suggest I have attained success and prestige in the field of my goodwork but merely that I have found the path and have begun to understand the process. I hope the same for others. When travelers meet, they may talk about the places they have been and the experiences they have had there. They say things like, “Did you ever make it to Edinburgh? Me too, there was a little pub there I always liked.” And then maybe, “Oh yes, we went in late summer and the weather was nice but I returned some years later in March and it was much colder than I would have liked. But all the lines were short and the castles empty for us to enjoy alone.” That’s something along the lines of what I aim for here. Travelers meeting and exchanging notes.
EFFICIENCY v. EFFECTIVENESS
One of the first lessons you learn in any pursuit is that things do not go smoothly in the beginning. The beginning of any endeavor has us accruing endless costs and expenses and the few wins here and there can spur us on but certainly do not begin to cover costs, let alone provide for growth.
When I began my various gardening projects, I wanted things to go smoothly and efficiently. Digging garden beds in the sun feels anything but smooth or efficient. But I would remember that the point of digging the beds was not to be efficient, as it only had to happen that one time. The point of these large time and labor costs was to be effective. To get it done and get the plants in the ground. So, it took several more afternoons than I had planned to get the soil prepared, and it took more than one trip to the hardware store for different tools and materials. The costs kept mounting and it destroyed my expectations of a smooth and inexpensive project. It didn’t matter. When the project was done, the garden was ready for the planting and I would never have to dig the beds out again.
The same is true for other pursuits. School, for example, is not an efficient process but an effective one. It is more time consuming and more expensive than you plan on but the point is not to get to the end as quickly and efficiently as possible but to put the time and study in that is required for you to get your degree. Going through the effort to set up the assembly line takes the majority of the time and energy and then when it is running smoothly you can put your mind toward efficiency and productivity. You will not make a ton of money on your first few clients, or on your first transactions with a new client, because creating the new relationship is about effectiveness, not efficiency.
Advice for this phase of your goodwork involves mostly mental rewiring. Because this phase does not involve the gratification of rewards but the collection of costs, it can be discouraging and frustrating. Try to adopt an attitude towards these challenges that reinforces your path – they are like milemarkers showing you the way. They may test your commitment, make you question your abilities, but they tell you that you are on the right path toward achievement.
Try to separate your activities into projects and production. Projects are your high cost endeavors with no return in the short run. Production is highly rewarding and more efficient. If you make the mistake of thinking your project will be as efficient as your production, you may become unnecessarily discouraged and frustrated. Instead, take it for what it is. Keep the faith that this project will eventually lead to an increased capacity for whatever your goodwork is, and do the work with that in mind. High expectations and delusions of grandeur will burden your mind and your project and may turn into procrastination, overwhelm, and maybe even quitting.
LOGORRHEA, THE ROLE OF PLANNING and ORDER
Logorrhea is defined as the excessive use of words. The way I use it here, I am also including other logical forms like plans, dreams, expression, calculations, thoughts, and discourse. It is quite common that people will get trapped in a state of logorrhea when they go about beginning a project or task. They talk about doing it, they fantasize about it or the rewards they will get from it, they will read about it and watch videos about it, they will write out detailed plans and to-do lists about it, they will crunch the numbers about it. Going even further, they will chastise themselves for not doing it sooner or not doing it as good as someone else. They will hate the obstacles and focus their energy on them rather than their aim. They will look for recognition and accolades, they will search for reasons, answers, and reassurance. They will imagine the perfect circumstances, look for them, wait for them. But all of these things have one thing in common: none of them will replace actually doing the thing.
To avoid this pitfall, try to keep your planning, accounting, and advertising in balance with actually doing the work, making the product, and pursuing action that brings substance. These planning activities should be limited to a small percentage of your time and the rest of your time should be used in working the plan and bringing it to fruition. There is always going to be a need for thorough plans and accurate accounting but the key is not to be carried away by the allure of purely abstract thought. You think, “Maybe if I change this around a little bit, I can make a few extra dollars per unit and then if I increase my sales by about ten percent a year it will compound to this amount after ten years and if I just capture one percent more of the business in the market I can make this much more money…” And soon enough you’ve done nothing but crunch numbers about goods and services that do not exist. You can’t eat a garden plan, so be sure to plant those tomatoes!
Do not complain, do not explain. It is my impression that people engaged in work waste precious time and energy in two key areas – complaining about the work and explaining themselves. There is a time and place for the expression of these two things. If something is bringing about far too many complaints, maybe it is time to sit back and consider if there is a better approach. And explaining yourself to others will always be necessary in this world of navigating other people, until we become telepathic. But watch carefully that you do not give in to endless complaining that has no ideas for betterment – this is whining. And make sure you are not spending excessive time and energy explaining yourself to others, as this may build the habit of seeking validation from others rather than satisfaction in the results of your work.
MAKING THE TRANSITION
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
This cannot really be called advice but is actually an immutable law of nature. We have to focus on what we can do since the alternative is what we cannot do. We have to use what we have since it is impossible to use what we do not have. And while we may end up in different places and conditions throughout our journeys, we must recognize in each moment where we are in reality in order to make real progress. The grass is greener where you water it.
People start their journeys toward their most meaningful work from all different backgrounds and positions. Some find a way to make it happen with relatively little education or support, these are entrepreneurs and business owners. Other lines of work like medicine or teaching require more educational inputs and involve a long process of improvement that is not as open to ‘overnight success’. I certainly don’t want to get surgery from someone who did not go to medical school and is just hustling for love of the game.
Whether the journey to your work is long or short, it is common to start from a place that is far divorced from the path you’d like to be on. Personally, I have been working in assembly for several years now and am actively engaged in changing that path. I am not sure what that will look like over the next few years but I know I will continue to work to get closer to doing something I care about, which helps others, and in which I can become a true master.
Patience is a difficult concept to grasp at times. The moment you think you have achieved patience, you start looking around for your reward… oops! That’s the point of patience! Keep going. There will never be a moment when you outgrow the need for patience. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how long your journey will last but let’s just say, for the sake of ease, that it will last you the rest of your life. While you are on the way, make sure you are becoming the type of person you would like to be, someone you can be proud of. The daily work does a little work on us, too, reforming us like clay over months and years.
Begin your journey where you are, have the humility to recognize and respect your starting point. It is easy to get used to the movie montage transformation, the zero-to-hero training sequence, the overhaul makeover, and the end credits rolling at the perfectly written conclusion. Our lives are not like that. They are littered with beginnings and endings of many different phases, interests, and personalities. This could be said to be the reality of goodwork. There is no end to goodwork because there is no moment in your life in which you would ever be content to live without connection, value, or creativity.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
The silver lining to the fact that you must start where you are is that you can also improve much faster than you think you can. As long as you are continuing to be honest with yourself about your limits, your resources, and your starting point, you can begin to make small gains in skills and resources that will compound over time.
A pitfall to avoid: assuming that your progress will always look the same as it does now, when you are beginning your pursuit. If it takes someone six months to save one thousand dollars, they despair that it will take them decades to get to where they want to be. But they do not account for the process of continuous improvement that they will undergo as they keep to their journey. In this example, they may begin to earn more as a result of a job change, they may find unnecessary expenses to cut from their budget, and the money they have saved begins to earn interest. They thought it would take them several decades to get to their goal but it ends up happening at an accelerated rate.
The prerequisite for continuous improvement is to commit to life and engage with the work. If you are constantly looking outside of yourself for happiness and fulfillment, you forfeit the ability to create your own. You will not be able to improve on something you refuse to work with, so you must be dedicated to this practice.
It may be discouraging to begin with little gains here and there. Certainly, these first improvements will seem unremarkable or insignificant. You may even feel embarrassed that things are going so slow, or that you are not making the leaps and bounds you envisioned for yourself. Consistency above all else will win you continuous improvement.
Conclusion
So, you start where you are. It is anything but perfect. The goals you wish to attain are specks in the distance. The point is to begin. Not to begin perfectly, not to fulfill your potential all at once, but just to get started. This is one of those pesky lessons you have to keep learning all your life. To be honest, I am not good at it. I have always wanted to be the prodigy, the natural, the chosen one. I want to pick things up quickly and without effort. That is a habit we have to work on, to learn that effort and work are glorious things to undertake and not an inconvenience from which we should escape.
In beginning a ‘Friends of the Garden’ series of posts, I would like to shed light on various plants and animals that bring tremendous benefit to not only our gardens but to nature in general. These posts will include a small portrait of this friend of the garden, as well as ways to encourage this friend and make a niche for them to thrive. I enjoy watching out for all these different forms of life and how they might come to appear in the garden; it is like collecting, without disturbing anything or catching anything. At the end of the season, I get to look back at all the different forms of life I had invited into my world. Some of these friends are having a hard time, so creating corners of the world that are friendly to them is likewise important and I hope to inspire some of that with these short posts. First, the bees.
Solitary bees
Not all bees are social in nature, such as the honeybees who form intricate hives and live in colonies. Some bees, known as solitary bees, make their nests in the cracks and crevices of logs, in sand or soil burrows, or even among cavities of hollow reeds. They are still excellent pollinators and should be encouraged by a bee-friendly garden of flowering native perennials. Coneflowers are an excellent choice for these gardens as they provide both food and shelter. Examples of solitary bees include: the mason bee, the leafcutter bee, the metallic bee, miner bees, and squash bees.
Bumblers
Bumblebees come in many varieties and I am always glad to see them hanging around our garden. Something about their graceful clumsiness, the way they bend the whole stem down when landing on a flower brings me immense joy. Bumblebee types include: the American bumblebee, the red-belted bumblebee, and the yellow-banded bumblebee. There are several varieties of bumblebee that were once prolific in the U.S. but which are now in trouble due to pesticide use and habitat disruption. Bumblebees do have a queen and a colony, though they are sometimes located in the ground rather than up in the trees, as a honeybee hive typically is.
Honeybees
The honeybee is a great bee for both pollination and the economically attractive habit of making honey. Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby, perhaps even a wonderful enterprise if you are so inclined, and can teach you more about the wonders of nature. But this post is not really about the honeybee or honey production, it is more about encouraging a huge range of native bee populations just for the fun of it! We may return to the traditional honeybee work in another post.
Let’s start low and go from there. Since many solitary bees and bumblebees make their home in or on the ground, it would be wise to provide these bees ample room to set up shop. Providing sandy soils, muddy areas, or hollow reeds will give the bees a place to make their home right in your garden. Allow your garden to ‘rest’ by leaving accumulated leafy material and twigs on the ground. This provides a refuge for all sorts of pollinating, beneficial insects to overwinter. Setting out shallow trays of water, with pebbles in the water for the bees to land on, will also encourage them.
Avoid using pesticides or chemical fertilizers in your garden. You may think the pesticides only ‘target’ the insects you do not want but these chemicals can have negative impacts on beneficial insects as well. And since their homes are made in or near the soil, treating the soil with strong chemical fertilizers may also disrupt their life cycles and make for a poor habitat. As always, do your due diligence before applying chemical anything to your garden so you can be aware of possible negative side effects, or just to make sure you are applying it correctly. Improper application of even a mild chemical can create issues.
Next, what to grow in your garden to attract the bees. I am a proponent of any flowering native perennial. If it is native, there is a chance it will provide a home for some type of native insect, even if it is not a honeybee. Since it is perennial, you won’t have to plant it every year and each year will bring a stronger growth. And because it flowers, it will provide food for birds and insects as well as beauty for your garden. It does not have to be only native plants, either.
Most websites on bee information recommend asters, echinacea (coneflower), and daisies. Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers are beautiful and also provide food and shelter for bees. We have planted prairie sunflower in our garden in the past few years as it is resilient and prolific. I have personally had good luck with sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ which does wonderfully in our local climate, as it is drought and cold tolerant, though not a native plant. The bees really seem to love it. The image above is a bumblebee sitting on blooming sedum I believe.
I would also personally recommend Anise Hyssop. It smells like warm spices and attracts so many insects to your garden, you won’t know what to do with them all. Other websites also recommend bee balm, borage, goldenrod, clover, salvia, and yarrow. We have had great experiences with borage, salvia, and yarrow as they are all incredibly hardy and return year after year – the borage is an annual but it self-seeds so aggressively that even many community gardens do not allow it to be planted. For our purposes, this is great news, as we want our pollinator-friendly garden to spread throughout the neighborhood!
Lastly, there are a few things you can create which may encourage these friends of the garden. Drilling holes in logs, providing bundles of reeds and sticks, even simple leaf and stick piles can come to serve the purpose of shelter for a native bee. There are many examples of bee structures you can DIY, plans for these projects litter the internet by the hundreds, and it would be a fun addition to your garden décor. I did not know until recently that bumblebees will use a bee-house (similar to a birdhouse) and that they are relatively simple to make. If you are not so handy to build your own, you can surely order some type of structure or have your crafty neighbor help you make one.
It may seem ridiculous to drill holes in a log or collect a bundle of sticks together but you must remember how sterile and barren the world has become. The habitable corners of the world for a native bee may be few and far between when it comes to living among us. It may be several miles of paved over road and parking lots, sterilized yards of chemically-treated turf grass, or barren xeriscape rock before they come to a spot where they can set themselves up. Drilling a silly hole in a silly little log could make the difference between them finding absolutely nothing and finding at least a little silly log.
Whenever you are creating a niche for something in your garden, just think about the main things they would need: water, food, and shelter. Then consider stopping anything which might deter your garden friends, such as chemical fertilizers or herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Soon enough your garden will be bursting with life and your garden friends will decide to come pay a visit, maybe even setting up a permanent home in your little corner of the world!
Conclusion
This post serves as a superficial primer on bees, a short look into these friends of ours and how to recognize them and bring them around. It is not the definitive source on bees and I would encourage anyone reading to look through a guide that is more thorough in its information. Below are links to several sites I visited while writing this post and which include a wealth of information on bees, their habitat, and encouraging their health. You can even order some bees over the internet if you are so inclined! Happy beekeeping!
Goodwork Almanac 