Garden Like a Farmer

Garden Like a Farmer

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Garden Like a Farmer
Garden Like a Farmer
Foundations

Foundations

Learning the dance and limiting stress.

Pierce Kennedy's avatar
Pierce Kennedy
Mar 31, 2025
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Garden Like a Farmer
Garden Like a Farmer
Foundations
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Alright, let’s get ever-so-gently “political” to start. Just a tad.

I’m a big proponent of Universal Basic Income, housing the unhoused, social services. There are scores of studies and examples that conclude: if you provide people with resources and an environment which limits stress, they thrive. They don’t buy 10 TVs and a Porsche. They create businesses, families, art. Which to my mind illustrates that people, like seeds, always contain potential, and it’s their environment and access to resources which limit their ability to flourish. In the same way, if the gardener can provide a seed, a plant, with resources and limit undue stress, that plant will thrive with obvious abundance. Just as providing essential resources and housing for people ought to be basic tenets of our social fabric, providing plants with essential resources and limiting stress are basic tenets of the gardener or farmer.

The gardener’s job is to provide and maintain these most basic foundations of growing plants: sunlight, temperature, moisture, and fertility. Understanding the interplay between these four factors, and harnessing them in correct proportion is precisely the dance of growing food, and nurturing a healthy garden. And it’s not only about knowing what to worry about, but also what not to worry about. Chatting with gardeners at the market, I’m often having conversations at wildly opposite ends of the “hope” spectrum: so optimistic as to ignore these factors, or so pessimistic as to forget to utilize them. I think this duality of hope is partially attributed to some lack of core understanding (where, hopefully I come in…) as well as the unpredictable nature of the backyard garden, with all it’s shady, soddy, soggy quirks.

So let’s dive in to square one, providing a stable footing for all every other facet of the garden.

Sunlight

When I first started gardening, I read books and plant tags that would say “Shade Tolerant.” Lettuce, spinach, potatoes, “Shade Tolerant.” I took this to mean that they either preferred shade or would grow equally well in shade. Placing my Rubbermaid tub of potatoes in the shadiest part of my backyard was, of course, misguided. But I still have some beef with theses garden books. Yeah, I understand the intent, and the designation might be technically true, but its misleading and unhelpful. A sort of “if you hit Main Street, you’ve gone too far” approach. Because in reality, there are no vegetables that prefer shade. Above all, the grower’s job is to create an environment that the crop would prefer, not an environment it will tolerate. Most vegetables are annual pioneer species—meaning they descend from plants that are evolutionarily designed to move in to disturbed, open spaces, and cover bare soil. Think sunny pastures, wetlands, edges. Vegetables are the tastiest, most breedable weeds. So, yeah it’ll tolerate shade, in so far as it won’t die in the shade, but it’ll never reach its full potential in the shade.

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