Do It With What You Got!
Working in the garden has taught me the truth of another basic principle of life: “Do the best with what you got.” My deeper awareness of this principle started last week when I went over the DMZ to drop off some coffee grounds for making compost. I discovered there that Growing Power had given them buckets of “brewers yeast”, a good source of nitrogen for compost and worm feed. I asked the person from Growing Power about the source of brewers yeast and he said it was a secret source and I should go out and ask some brewers. I asked a friend who I knew had some and he said the same thing — go out and seek some from brewers. I know enough about collecting waste for compost to know that a small home model gardener like I am needs sources that do not require a consistent and regular pick up and sources not valuable for sale. All my other sources for compost materials, coffee grounds from coffee shops, wood chips from dump, vegetable waste from a dumpster behind a store, grass and leaves and kitchen waste do not require a systematic pick up. Also none of them are valuable like brewers yeast that can be sold to farmers for cattle feed. So my compost, worms and I need to be content with the waste we can get. My awareness of this principle also increased today when I was outside working on the irrigation system in front and back from the rain barrels to garden and rain garden.
I have been working on creating a good irrigation system from the rain barrels in back and in front of house to direct water to the garden and rain garden. I keep on buying different kinds of hoses and connections but both systems did not seem to be effective. Finally I decided to make the best of what I had to create a system. I took a washer from one hose to another, use some staples I had to hold down the hose, use a bottle opener and a nail to put holes in the hose. With the only official tools used being a hammer and pliers I was able to create an effective water system in the back and front. No new purchases, but just some creative thinking and using what I had worked.
Thinking about doing the best with what you got I realized that nature always does this. For example, with all the rain we had recently there was much flooding and man-made dams broke when the excess water in rivers and lakes needed to go somewhere. On the Wisconsin River at the man-made Lake Delton the dam held, so the excess water just found another way to get into the Wisconsin River by washing out a road and three houses to create a new pathway. I read a number of articles how the disaster in New Orleans a few years ago was not so much the result of the tornado but of the human attempts to change nature by doing things like widening the channel of Mississippi for boats.
On a personal, nature, and world level we need to accept what we got and make the best of it. History has taught us that when one country occupies another county to “save” them or to take their wealth and land, eventually the occupation fails. Occupation, just like taking something you do not have, does not work. Like nature, the persons occupied or the person suffering the loss will find a way to restore balance and order.
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