Plants Want to Survive
Do you have a line that you find yourself repeating in conversations and at social gatherings so often that you rarely stop to wonder if it’s actually true? I have one, whenever I find myself talking about my garden (which is often): Plants want to survive. Will my plants make it through this recent heatwave? Yes, plants want to survive. Is it ok that I’m out of town for the next week and there’s no rain in the forecast? Yes, plants want to survive. Sometimes when I’m tending to my garden — and I’m certain nobody is within earshot — I whisper to my plants I love you, I want you to survive. Obviously I don’t think plants can understand speech but I do believe all living things respond affirmatively to positive energy, be it heat, warmth, water, and, yes, even occasional words of encouragement.
Here’s the thing: It’s not false that plants want to survive, but it’s only half true. Plants do want to survive but on their own terms. This is true of all living things, plant and animal. So when I whisper I want you to survive to my vegetables what I really mean is I want you to survive long enough that you’ll grow to maturity and then I can eat you and transfer your nutrients to my body and the plant’s response is Yeah, well maybe. We’ll see about that. And then sometimes the plants don’t survive. Sometimes they’ll shrivel up as seedlings or allow bugs and birds to consume them long before I’ll get a chance to. That was true this year when I attempted to start some vegetables indoors so I could then transfer the seedlings to the ground when the last frost was behind us. Some of the seeds did well, and some didn’t even come close. Boston got a cold snap right when I needed to transfer the seedlings that did survive to the garden and then those seedlings eventually decided they’d had quite enough and then they died. It didn’t matter how often I whispered to them. In the end, I transferred no seedlings to my garden.
In that spirit, this year I’m attempting what’s called a polycultural vegetable bed method. This means foregoing all the characteristics of a well-maintained garden — neat, even rows of separated vegetables — in favor of something more closely resembling the natural world. I took a wide variety of vegetables — radishes, spinach, lettuce, kohlrabi, beets, collards, kale, rainbow chard, cilantro, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, and more — and scattered them evenly throughout the garden with about a half inch of soil covering it. As Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen write in their book The Urban Homestead in doing so “The bigger [plants] will protect the smaller ones from harsh sun or rainfall. One plant will attract a beneficial insect which preys on the bugs that eat a neighboring plant. One type of plant takes nitrogen from the soil, another puts nitrogen back in the soil.”
I’m allowing the plants to survive on their own terms with as little interference from me as possible, and in doing so nature will allow them to protect and nurture one another. In an ideal world this is how humans would behave as well, though we all know that’s not always the case unfortunately. No matter. Already the polycultural vegetable bed is proving to be a success. Collards growing alongside beets. Cilantro growing alongside spinach. Not all of my plants will survive of course, but I look forward to learning from the ones that do.
