Living the Good Life

I just finished reading Helen and Scott Nearing's book The Good Life, about their 60 years of self-sufficient living on farms in Vermont and then in Maine. The Nearing's embraced the back to the land movement during the Great Depression years. Their book described the good life they sought which divided their time into three segments: time to make their food ("bread labor"), time for personal pursuits, and time for service to others. Notice that no time was spent accumulating money or buying things. It's all about living simply and for them, that was the definition of a good life. The book documented how they built their house, budgeted their resources, and raised crops. I enjoyed the book for its documentation of a place and time in history as well as for its timeless gardening advice.

Sugar Snap Peas

I put a bit of that advice right to work in my garden. Over the weekend I weeded and mulched and staked. The garden's looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. It's already more fruitful than in year's past because the soil is better now, after three years of use and continual work on building it up with compost. The Nearings would be proud. Earlier in the spring, I dug out several long wood violet roots that probably sucked away a lot of water from the garden vegetables in years past. While wood violets are quite edible and I do throw them into my salads from time to time, I'm not ready to cultivate them just yet. Inspired by the Nearing's, I pulled up the spinach that was bolting and immediately replanted lettuce in that area. After the lettuce takes us through the heat of the summer, I'll plant more spinach. I'm looking forward to taking their advice on planting lots of root crops in the fall and seeing how long they take us into fall and winter.

Tomato Vine

Today I will pick the first of the sugar snap pea crop. We'll have some sort of stir fry for dinner. There are lots and lots of tomatoes on their way. About 25 small tomatoes are on the vine and double that number of flowers. About a dozen of the tomatoes are just beginning to turn pinkish red. Squash flowers are blooming and the cucumbers are coming up at last.

My Garden Path

It's turned hot now. We've had temperatures in the 90's for a week or so now. But it hasn't chased me indoors yet. I have to spend at least an hour every morning checking on my vegetable and flower gardens, feeding the fish, and refilling the bird feeders.

While not the Nearing's Good Life, it's good for me. I suppose my life is divided into quarters: time for "bread labor" (which is not all time in the garden!), time for personal pursuits, time for others, and time for earning money to pay for the other "necessities" of modern life (electricity, the Internet, transportation, etc.). This simple life, while not self-sufficient, is good.