Joy of Nature

Elsewhere on this web site I have described growing soil starting with waste, composting it, adding worms and making ‘black gold’, castings or rich soil. This weekend at a parish festival I will once recreate this process, which normally takes time, in a few minutes in the “Uncle Bob’s Growing Power Magic Show.”

After years of making soil, my small batch of gardens in the back, side and front of the house are doing well Growing Renewable Affordable Food. Almost every dinner includes one or more foods from the gardens — vegetables or herbs.

However, to get to this point of a small, productive, fairly easy to maintain garden took a lot of effort and making of soil. My gardens now sit on ground we made. Like anything worthwhile in life the more you work on it the more there is to do. For example, today I decided to build another sifter to sift the soil from the worm box for the second time. Buckets of enriched soil wait for me to shake, rattle and roll the soil through the screen in making fine castings. Today I put the worms back in the worm box for a third time this year. The worms keep expanding in numbers, a sign that are enjoying their work and reproducing.

Working in a garden is work, but it is the kind of work that St. Thomas Aquinas talked about when he said: “There can be no joy in living without joy in work.”

In rural societies, dwindling in the USA but still dominant in countries like India and Guatemala, there seems to be a built-in joy that comes from working with the soil. Perhaps it has something to do with the science of working with ground featured in the article Nature’s Bounty; Soil Salvation. Probably finding joy in working on farm or garden has something to do with nature. I have never heard of technology being described as full of joy but certainly nature can be described that way often.

Once while we lived in Madison, Wisconsin we took a walk on a nature trail along one of the lakes in the city. It was a beautiful and joyful experience of nature. Afterward, out of nowhere, the thought struck me that when humans create nature it would be the end of the world. In my mind, with all our technology we still have a long way to go to be able to create nature. In the meanwhile we have the “joy of nature.”

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