Plenitude

He loved the land. And no one knew what these chemicals would do to the soil, or to us, over time.

Diane Wilson, The Seed Keeper 240

By the end of WWI, a quarter of artillery shells had chemical weapons in them. The interwar years intensified the focus on chemical warfare. The production of nitrogen for manufacturing explosives led to adaptations for use as fertilizer in agriculture (Hayes, Hanson 2017). Chemicals use to combat disease borne by insects during wartime were adapted for the control of pests in farming. Herbicides which had been used to devastate food supplies in war were now used to control weeds at home. Development of genetically modified crops resistant to pests (that propagate pesticide resistance) ensued. Increased pesticide application followed. Farmers no longer bought seeds - they rented them, beholden to the companies who now owned the means of production of their produce.

He agreed to grow the new corn under contract to the ethanol plant, feeding the country’s voracious appetite for fuel. The company would provide the schedule, the seeds, the chemicals, and even help with the harvest. They gave John a list of equipment he needed to buy and changes that had to be made to the fields and buildings. Tommy helped negotiate the loan we needed from the bank, more money than John used to make in an entire year. A few months before the first shipment of seeds was due to be delivered, I knocked on the door of Tommy’s room. He was a young man now and kept it closed all the time. His deep voice cracked as he called out for me to enter. Inside, clothes were strewn in untidy heaps, a math book was open on his desk, and he sat playing his favorite video game. He looked at me with curiosity, so seldom did I come to his room except to put away laundry. “What’s up?” “Tommy, your father listens to you. If you tell him not to use these seeds, he’ll pay attention.” “Why would I do that?” I told him my fears. Then I added an argument that I hoped would spark a memory of what he had learned as a boy. “It’s not right what they’ve done to these plants. It’s not right to take life apart like that, just because it will make money. You remember when you were younger, and we talked about how the corn feeds the little voles, who become food for the hawks? How the sandhill cranes eat the leftover seeds when they stop here to rest during their fall migration? Even the crows rely on field corn to survive. What happens to the birds when they eat these seeds? What happens to us?” “Nothing, Mom. Nothing is going to happen to the birds or to you and me and Dad. Except that, for once, we will make some good money. Even you can’t argue with that. You might even buy yourself something decent to wear.”(Wilson 235-236).

***

Farming has never been an easy occupation. Droughts and floods, early frost and late season snows, and the more general unpredictability of how weather patterns affect animal movements and the insects that accompany their movements, make it an uncertain enterprise. Large yields are necessary to break even. Monoculture beckons because of the simplicity it affords: one crop, one harvest. Over time, chemical interventions reduced the habit of intercropping, and planting green manure. No organic materials were necessary now that the seeds themselves carried the nitrogen that would grow the promised crops. Having indebted themselves to the companies who owned their seed, farmers found themselves in a double bind. There never seemed to be a way to return to those locally specific practices that would allow the soil to regenerate with the rotation of crops, the interplanting of nitrogen-fixing species. Equally dire, farming was increasingly happening far from the earth, from the angle of a tractor cab. Without hands in the earth, it was easier to convince oneself what every farmer knows is not true: the soil will survive the onslaught of chemical warfare.

Soil is an organism that tends to itself if we give it a chance. Running roughshod over its needs, feeding it chemicals year after year, creating conditions for mass crop loss due to ecological devastation, destroys its fine balance.

As instrumentalized agriculture became the norm, the market value of the crops was segregated from the direct experience of the plants, the land now indebted to the companies whose seed grew on it, life’s verve diminished. This is not to say that under these conditions all life dies. With stark ecological imbalance comes increased disease. Pest resistance requires new chemicals and more of them. Stacking becomes the norm: building seeds up with stacks of chemicals to counteract resistances. “Corn and soy are the top two crops in the US, and the number one and six (respectively) most planted crops in the world. At present, 80-90% of all corn and soy planted in the US are glyphosate resistance (“Roundup ready”) crops and, more GMO crops are being developed with the use of ‘stacking’ where plants are rendered resistant or tolerant to more than one herbicide. These herbicide resistance varieties will permit (and require) the use of even more herbicides” (Hayes, Hanson 2017). The chemical industry and the seed industry are intertwined in this method of farming which has taken over the world. Six chemical companies distribute an overwhelming percentage of the seeds used in agriculture (Howard 2009 in Hayes, Hanson 2017).

Chemically dependent agriculture is a fragile enterprise. The soil now depleted, its complex microbiome destroyed by chemical fertilizer, monoculture planting techniques and regular ploughing, its top soil continuously broken down, it has little vigour to face the unpredictability of increasingly extreme climate events. Farming becomes a kind of russian roulette, hoping to get ahead of any impromptu infestation or weather event. But as climate changes, and these very chemicals that were meant to feed the world with pest-free produce lead to world-wide overexposure, travelling through water, air and migrating animals, the earth is less and less resilient, as is our food forest (Hayes, Hanson 2017).

***

Permaculture is, before all else, a practice of attunement. Seeking to replicate the forest with the premise of being “permanent agriculture,” it thrives in the recognition that soil welcomes complexity, and refuses monoculture. Only disturbed soil tends naturally to monoculture, but even the “weeds” that end up taking over the disturbance are life, taking hold of the barren earth to break its crust, building nitrogen and elemental complexity toward a future of eventual proliferation. The problem is, with climate change and human greed, we don’t have the time to wait.

Permaculture, as much an ethos as a form of gardening, emphasizes observation, creative use of energy and water through locally designed systems, sharing resources, reducing waste, and above all, taking care to regenerate soil health. Permaculture principles are alive in most local gardening cultures, whether called permaculture or not. In the locality of attunement, gardeners - an obsessive species - observe plants from the crouched position of nose-to-plant that keeps the hands in the soil. From this vantage, they notice minute changes - soil texture, tiny seedlings, bugs. From daily tending, they recognize when a plant is not thriving in its location, and are apt to shift its conditions if at all possible. They ache at the loss of their crop when it is devastated by pests and are creative in the devising of systems of pest control, if not always successful. Whatever their ways of gardening, at a local scale, the ecology itself is generally foregrounded, and in time, an acute sense of the microconditions allows for techniques that foster not only a thriving garden but a healthy ecosystem.

Principles that emerge from permaculture aid in this process, reducing the need to hoe the earth or pull weeds through no-dig and mulching. A reminder that plants co-exist in complimentary ways feeds the process, and gardeners learn to interplant, testing the companionship potential of their local sites. Here in zone 3B, where the soil is still frozen in May and frosts lurk in September, marigolds come up only mid-summer and nasturtiums are a favourite of the groundhog. Permaculture flower staples are therefore not my first approach. Instead, I learn to identify what grows of its own accord, in perennial variation, that attracts pollinators and may repel animals (who, honestly, are not easily dissuaded in my northern Quebec forest). I plant to share, and protect what most matters to me.

Instrumentality breeds method. When something becomes a method, the process loses verve. Attunement is never attunement to method. Method is imposition, at arm’s length, in theory. Practice is richest not when subjugated to method, but when nose-to-plant, hands in the earth, in seedtime.

It is because of my daily work in the fields that I am aware of this other time: seedtime. A farmer relies on both intuition and experience to build fertility into a field, to bring a crop to fruition, or to establish a field of grains—oats, buckwheat, rye, or red clover. It is much more difficult to discern the precise syllables latent within a seed embryo. To do that, or at least to attempt to, I am led beyond the crop rows to the adjacent hedgerow, where I can observe the beauty and diversity of wild seeds. (Chaskey 2014: 2)

Practice is technique, seedtime its a-chronology. In the future-anterior of a commitment to both the intensive present (what is growing here, now) and the planning toward a future (what else can be done here, under different conditions), seedtime is a process of immersive attention to the now while engaged in the continuous redirection of potential. Direct observation in habitual repetition teaches a kind of learning that grows in the doing. A task that began at one end of the garden soon leads to hours spent elsewhere, motored by the emergent necessities as they appear, the seed itself, a burst of potential held in suspended animation, leading the way. The hours pass, “giv[ing] pattern to our days” (Eck and Waterrowd 2009, 285).

Pattern is intensive contrast. Blue-green kale leaves are tinged, in the distance, with the pink of the fireweed. It’s a challenge, in the garden, to perceive anything in segregation. Even a row of a plant, if one plants in rows, is impossible to fully focus on, attention continuously called to what tethers it toward its surround. And with this, always a view to what might grow in the future, and how what is here will develop, or move. What will change when the apple trees grow toward maturity? Will the daylilies have to be moved? And what about the enormous birch? If it dies, how will that change my corner of shade for midsummer lettuces?

Permaculture teaches us to notice what else thrives in the vicinity by turning our attention to the personality of the soil itself. If we are no longer approaching the soil in instrumental ways, pulling from it what we need without recognizing its own complex microbiome, we begin to attend to the minor deviations of a site, and notice what else is growing in its surround. I have learned, working in very acidic conditions, with sandy, clay-tending earth, that the presence of lambsquarter signals that I am reaching better levels of nitrogen, and so, while I do still pull them out before they flower (their seeds are prolific), I appreciate their presence. The low-lying broadleaf plantain, hard to pull because of its taproot, I recognize as an intermediary sign. In an attempt to retain soil moisture, it comes up where the soil is moving toward fertility, working as it does to break up compacted soil. Unless it’s directly in the way of a root system, I always leave it. But there are few “weeds,” which is to say, unwanted locals, thanks to the mulch that both keeps the soil moist and adds a cover to the soil so that it’s less receptive to all that moves in the wind. Around the garden, I welcome all that wants to grow, appreciating how the tall wildflowers keep the earth cool. In high summer, I water infrequently - perhaps 4 times a summer, focusing mostly on tomatoes and brassica. Only the greenhouse gets regular watering, a necessity because it is segregated from weather.

***

“If we think of practices such as organic gardening, greywater reuse, natural building, renewable energy – and even less tangible activities such as more equitable decision-making and social justice methods – as tools for sustainability, then permaculture is the toolbox that helps us organize and decide when and how to use those tools” (Hemenway 2015 xii).

The liberatory angle of permaculture which sells it as the design method can feel glaring in its schoolmarmy admonitions. Any method does that, giving into the belief that it best knows how to encapsulate the field. There is no doubt that as an urgent response to monoculture, chemical-dependent farming, permaculture has shifted the discourse in ways that have proliferated internationally. But in its enthusiasm to convert (and make money through certifications) it has also tended to obfuscate the interstitial, non-permaculture but soil-enhancing, local-tending, practices that occur nose-to-plant, and have for centuries. The challenge is to refuse the imposition of dogma, and to resist the ways this dogmatic stance recalibrates the world toward colonializing tendencies. Because even the best agricultural techniques can be mechanisms for the maintenance of segregated living on borrowed land too often mortgaged for these purposes.

***

Provision grounds were planted during slavery to feed families. A lively mix of flowers, fruit and vegetables, these fertile environments fed families both physically and spiritually. Medicinal plants were grown as well as plants brought as seeds from Africa. Planted both around their houses (often called kitchen gardens) and on the margins of the plantation, in the brambles, these gardens tended life. Not that it was easy: work in one’s own garden was only possible at the beginning or end of a sixteen-hour day, or on Sunday.

Yam, cassava, plantain, banana, okra, citrus, wild ackee, guava, mango, tamarind, cashew, avocado - all of these plants that grew to be culturally significant began in provision grounds (Tobin 1999). In addition, medicinal knowledge was passed on. “West African slaves brought herbal knowledge with them when they were transported in slave ships, whose holds were lined with African grasses and other plants, the seeds of which were also present (Eisnach, Covey 2019, 16). Later, these techniques integrated local wild plants, gathered from the fields or grown in the provision grounds (16).

Where permaculture is most potent is where it needn’t name itself, where it recognizes its heritage in Indigenous foraging and gardening techniques, in provision grounds, and where it retains humility with respect to these ancient, living practices that remained attuned to what Edouard Glissant calls “the aesthetics of the earth,” its intensive web of relation (XXXX). In the concern to attune to what grows (and what doesn’t), it is the growing itself, the tending of the relational surround, that is the most emphatic teacher. Too often, adding to the existing (though increasingly depleted) food forest by planting seeds is borne of an ignorance of what is already there, what is already thriving. This perspective, bemoaned by Indigenous communities in Quebec who note that people are happy to create home gardens and think of themselves as ecologically attuned while barely noticing the deforestation of the province and the ongoing devastation of the planet, reminds us that seedtime itself is what we must tend. We must be caretakers of what seeds itself. If we focus only on the spoils of human intervention, we will have been complicit in the ongoing devastation of what grows in the midst, often too quickly pulled out of those patches of land we call gardens. In the clearing, we will have missed the plenitude of the food forests. To garden out of the clear, there must be a sensitivity to the modesty of the gesture, and to the force of all that wants to reseed itself with a thousand times more verve than those poor seeds planted inside mid-march while there was still snow on the ground. We need not stop gardening (no life can be separate from a certain practice of self-seeding), but we must recognize the bracketing quality of the enterprise, the forest kept at bay for the pleasure of what can be seeded and tended, and eventually eaten and shared.

Modesty must accompany this gesture. And with modesty, methods cannot lead. A realization of the fragility of the enterprise accompanies each visit to the garden, and gardeners on their knees know this well. To enter the garden two, three times a day, is to meet infinite transformation. Not only has the plant grown, or faded, but there have been hundreds of other disturbances in the short absence, especially if the garden is away from the house, in the forest, as mine is. A tomato I admired earlier, the first almost-ripe one on the plant, is now on the ground with a hole eaten into it, and the tomatillos plants have been eaten, again, by the resident deer fawn. For a few minutes I don’t see anything else, focused on a tomato branch having come undone from the trellis I have constructed. Then I see it - the large Titonia, a Mexican sunflower I’ve been anxious to experience, whose first bloom was just about to open, has been knocked down. Upon approach I see that the flower is gone, and the leaves devoured. And then: a small opening in the brassicas. No more leaves. But also: the asparagus fronds are pushing out of the earth, through the strawberries. I was so certain they wouldn’t grow. And the purple beans are almost ready to eat. And there are blooms on the squash plant. I mentally count the days, wondering whether there will be time for them to fruit.

With every gesture, in every movement, I find myself in the midst of a complex field, pulled to the call of the plants themselves, and to their lively surround. To garden is to attune to pattern and deviation. It is to be made by the surround and to be in the tending of that ecology, where it is easy to lose one-self. There is complex rhythm here. Midday gardens, just after the rain, are at the most danger of being nibbled on. Early mornings are crisp, almost always, the nights hovering around 10 degrees even at the height of summer, late afternoons getting buggy, but also the moment when that flower finally opens.

***

My mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in . . . . Before she left home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass, and laid out new beds…whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties.

Alice Walker 2004, 24.

Black landowners played an important role in The Civil Rights Movement in the US. They were key organizers, “providing lodging, food, and an organizational structure for Freedom Riders, facilitated voting rights, organizing, and spearheaded anti-Jim Crow activism” (White 2018: 3). Much earlier, in 1898, George Washington Carver and the Agricultural Experiment Station at Tuskegee published its first bulletin, ranging from outlining what wild foods are edible, to techniques for growing and processing cultivated produce (White 2018: 42,43). In this first tract, as Monica M. White foregrounds in her book Freedom Farmers, attention is already focused on the dangers of monocropping, benefits of crop rotation and diversification, techniques for using plant-based materials for clays, stains and paints, the use of medicinal plants, both wild and domestic, and food preservation such as canning, pickling, and curing (42).

There is controversy around the Tuskegee project, particularly as concerns the tendency to background revolutionary verve by giving in to the dominant white supremacist capitalist culture of its surround, “raising” Black experience to its level rather than reveling in blackness’s exorbitant refusal to be subject to ontologies that exclude it.

In the wake of the Tuskegee project, however, many cooperative land-based projects blossomed, including the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) founded by Fannie Lou Hamer in 1967. The proposal was to purchase land collectively such that Black folk would be able to stay in the south, “creat[ing] a healthy community based on building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort” (White 65). Hamer’s strategy was ecosophical, her focus not only on agriculture but on voting rights and property rights: “Land is key. It’s tied to voter registration” (in White 71).

FFC provided housing, health care, employment, education and access to healthy food. It saw itself as a site for the creation of “a new form of collective political consciousness” […] using “the strategies of commons as praxis, prefigurative politics, and economic autonomy to achieve collective agency and community resilience” (in White 72). Over the course of its tenure, it owned 692 acres and was worked collectively by 1500 families in Sunflower County (in White 73). In addition to people working the land, living on it and being sustained by it, ten percent or more of its harvest was donated to families incapable of working the fields (in White 76).

While the project ultimately ended due to financial scarcity, it has become a beacon for current projects, amongst them the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), one of many urban farms in Detroit that has re-energized the city. DBCFSN’s programs include youth gardening (Food Warriors Youth Development Program), and Food N’Flava, teaching young Black folk to make more nutritional and delicious food choices. Another current example, in New York State: Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm and non-profit educational organization. Like DBCFSN, Soul Fire Farm extends its reach beyond organic farming toward community building, including BIPOC trainings, youth and intergenerational education and anti-racism training. In collaboration with The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, it also funds a Braiding Seed Fellowship, working to “bridge north-south and legacy-returning generations of farmers.”

***

It actually has taught us to love every day of our life.

Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, 2009, 285.

If you work chiefly with your hands, which is to say, without the distances fostered by heavy machinery, the garden’s promise is incremental. Focus is often infinitesimally local - you find yourself crouching low to the ground in early June to see if seedlings may be coming up, or you are trying to pull up a few stray weeds from the strawberry ground cover without decimating them. At the same time, the view is wide, infinite. You see the trees and wonder how they will change in time, and you catch yourself wondering how and where and what you will seed next year, wondering what will have changed in the perennial garden after one more long winter. Will the leak have fully perennialized by then, allowing you to pull a stalk or two? Will the patch of garlic grown in the compacted earth have pried it apart enough to grow another bulb? Will the perennial flowers spread, blooming earlier, now that they’ve taken hold? Will they have survived the winter?

In the seedtime of the future anterior, in the will have been of a garden very much alive right now, the pace is both urgent and impossibly slow. Almost every day, during peak tomato growing season, I find myself retying them, securing their heavy branches to structures I have prepared long in advance, during those slow months that others call spring, but still very much feels like winter here. I’ve tried seeding early, tricking the earth, but she gives when she is ready, and that is always after I am ready. But once it heats up enough, plants can visibly change in the course of a day. And then, as August advances and the soils begin to cool again, they slow and I worry about the unfruited tomatoes, about the squash flowers, about the missing broccoli and cauliflower heads. September seems to be the season of harvest, though as climate changes I notice there is more to harvest in August. It’s only a two-year old garden, so I am still learning.

The incremental nature is the process. At nose-to-plant height, it’s not unusual to be completely consumed by one corner of the garden. It’s easy, in the close observation of tomatoes slowly turning to miss the potential of an unused edge. This happened recently, when I found a stray foxtail growing on its own amongst the wildflowers and raspberries. The surprise of this fragile tiny plant with its pink downward sloping bells had me pulling the raspberries, and then the goldenrod, and then cutting back the poplar growing out of an old tree trunk, and then, before I knew it, getting the chainsaw to cut down other small trees, discovering a large, 2 meter by 2 meter rock, and then another, and wanting to make a clearing between them, pulling out other stray trees. I garden in a forest, in a treed surround, and my inclination is to work with what is there, and plant for the quality of sun offered. But the little foxglove directed me, two years in, to a magic forested enclave, which will now host shade plants, and perhaps, on the edge, more foxtail.

Crafting a small opening for light and air immediately changes everything. Now the seeded flower garden just beyond has a new angle of sun, no longer dampened by the poplar. I wonder whether this will increase the size of the perennials, a year from now. Walking over to check on the flowers, I recognize what I have already known but not quite digested: this same garden, far too acidic for the spinach I so badly wanted to harvest, cannot continue to host vegetables. It simply makes them suffer. So I plant an Azalea, and decide to add blueberries later this fall. Standing there, on the far edge of my space, I once more become aware that the other side, the stream side, where old wood rots under manure and the asparagus and strawberries grow with abandon, as do the strawberries, is by far my most fertile soil. But a few meters to the side where asparagus gives way to stray onion flowers (because they grew of their own accord, their bulbs forgotten in the soil last year), are two very sad tomatoes, the only sad ones of the 61 kinds I have planted this year. I have no idea why. What happened to the earth at that infrathin border? The Jack Pie delight there, a stand of self-seeded meter high flowers growing with enthusiasm. Maybe they don’t like tomatoes.

Where the soil is poor, you learn. But to say it is poor is really to only speak like a human. The soil is not poor for the conifers that grow like weeds on it, or for the raspberry and blueberry, the goldenrod and aspen. There is ample hazelnut, and hundreds of edible plants. Permanent agriculture is listening to the tension between a desire to control seedtime and honing the practice of letting it take the lead. What growing a garden does best is lead you back to tend what is already there, recognizing the seasonal interlopers for what they are, and relishing in the hesitant gift of their produce.

***

The garden. What did you think when you walked into my small room? One side a pharmacy of pills stacked near an old woman’s recliner. The other side, by my window, a garden made of buckets and cans packed with precious soil I carried from the city’s rose garden. I went at night, just after dusk, and filled my bucket nearly to the top, allowing a bit of room to spill, to lose a precious inch on the bus ride home when the wašíču would glare as if no one wanted to sit too close to the crazy Indian with her heavy pail. No one offered to help when they watched me bump and drag that pail through the door. Phhh. I did not need their help. In each container, I placed a single seed after wetting it first in my mouth. That wakes it, you see, tells the seed that the sleeping time is done. It’s the spit that brings us together. People told me it couldn’t be done. No. They said it shouldn’t be done. Not on the third floor of an apartment building for elders. Think of the mess. Think of the inconvenience. Think of the strangeness of it. I could only shrug my shoulders, thinking of their strangeness in not seeing the absolute necessity for what I was doing. See that corn there? Have you ever seen anything grow so straight and tall? There’s a good reason for what I’m doing. If I told you it came to me in a dream, would you believe me? How about if I told you that a crow, one with a husky voice that sounded like my sister Lorraine’s after all her years of smoking, was the one who said it was time for me to plant this garden? You seemed surprised when you came in. But your call caught me by surprise, too, caught in the moment of thinking about you, saying a prayer with the hope that wherever you were, you were healthy and safe. After nearly thirty years, I didn’t expect to ever see you again. That’s why I started the garden. All those seeds in my closet, all that’s left of my family—they had to be planted or they’d die, just like us. (Wilson 2021: 1)

***

The knowledge is there still, in books, in conversation, even, as one works it, in a row of tomatoes.

Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, 2009, 142

Alfred North Whitehead reminds us: “Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology” (1929, 12). A methodology is a generalization of process that scales it for legibility. Its role is to extract from process a measure of predictability that can then be applied to other processes. Coming at process from the top down, method skews process toward the containment it requires to make sense of it. Method can only retain its value if it can be deployed to settle difference.

We are asked to justify practice with method. Knowledge mobilization requires it. Knowledge mobilization is the stratifying modality that separates university knowledge, “learned” knowledge, from the incremental, ecosophic approaches that grow at nose-in-plant level. These nose-in-plant level modes of knowing are not easily packaged. The stories they generate are full of hesitations and redirections. We can’t know, after all, what next spring will bring, whether the last frost will occur in May or June, what the beds will have done over winter, or even where we will be drawn, once the earth begins to thaw.

Improbably, I’ve decided to try to direct seed some tomatoes in the fall. I’ve noticed, as every gardener does, even this far north, that stray tomatoes do come up by themselves in the mid summer. I never remove the plants in the fall, so these unlikely travellers are seeds that found the conditions they needed and took advantage of them. The problem is that our season isn’t long enough for a tomato that decides to grow in August. So next year I will try to be more directive in my approach. This technique may or may not yield fruit. It will teach me what to try next.

Technique is not method. Exploratory, curious, it moves from the hands-on experience of trying something out. In the garden, this is slow. A whole winter must be lived through before knowing whether we are on the right track. My aim in the garden is to move toward as much self-seeding as possible - I see how quickly the perennials grow, already green under snow, and yearn for plants with that tenacity.

But in other domains, it needn’t be quite so incremental. A technique for thinking produces the opening of a movement for thought that seeds a practice, or a theoretical orientation, or a philosophical inclination. We needn’t know in advance what it will yield. In fact, knowing - or believing we know - is, all told, just another colonial method for justifying the dominion of a single way over ecosophical abundance. Not knowing in advance does not mean passively waiting. It means being in the activity of tending that abundance.

Of all the qualities a vegetable garden must suggest, plenitude, both potential and actual, is the most important (Eck and Winterrowd, 28).

WORKS CITED

Barickman, B. J. “A Bit of Land, Which They Call Roça: Slave Provision Grounds in the Bahia Recôncavo, 1780-1860” in Hispanic American Historical Review. 74:4 1994.

Chaskey, Scott. Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics and Promise of Seeds. Rodale Books, 2014.

Eck, Joe and Winterrowd, Wayne. Our Life in Gardens. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2009.

—-. Living Seasonally. Henry Holt and Co, 1999.

Eisnach, Dwight and Covey, Herbert C. “Slave Gardens in the Antebellum South: The Resolve of a Tormented People” The Southern Quarterly. Vol 57, no 1 (fall 2019)

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Hayes, Tyrone B and Hansen, Martin. “From silent spring to silent night: Agrochemicals and the Anthropocene, in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene (2017) 5: 57.

Hemenway, Toby The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.

Kincaid, Jamaica. The Garden (Book). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Tobin, Beth Fowkes “And there raise yams”: Slaves’ Gardens in the Writings of West Indian Plantocrats. Eighteenth-Century Life. Volume 23, Number 2, May 1999

Von Hippel, Frank, podcast: “The Chemical Age - How Tools of War Became Agricultural Chemicals.” https://joegardener.com/podcast/chemical-age-how-tools-of-war-became-agricultural-chemicals/ october 6, 2022.

White, Monica M. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2018.

Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mother’s Garden Amistad Press 2004.

Wilson, Diane. The Seed Keeper: A Novel. Milkweed Editions, 2021.