Cardboard has become a savior in the garden where I spend so much time replacing weeds with plants I WANT to cultivate. The black plastic weed barrier that was put down under mono-colored dark brown wood chips when the realtors “staged” this house for selling appeal is being replaced with whatever cardboard boxes come into this house. Friends and family are also donating newspaper and cardboard to the cause. There's a LOT of yard here - front and back.
While I hate black plastic. Weeds love to grow right through it!
On YouTube there are countless videos about permaculture methods for growing vegetables. Morag Gamble, in Australia, is my favorite teacher. From her, I’ve learned how to put newspaper on top of the earth with wood chips over, covered by a layer of good soil, topped off with hay as a retainer of moisture. In this way, the clay and rock substrata, which is the norm on top of these Oakland hills, is beginning to soften, becoming enriched, actually supporting life again! I see worms multiplying, helping the process by digesting the clay that is hard enough to make dishes!
Gratitude reigns when I’m in the garden. How lucky we are to have a bit of land to support life growing. I see lizards and birds becoming more and more prolific, the more vegetable plants are out-numbering place-holder invasive ground-covers.
Power over weeds is a tonic in a time when I'm feeling impotent against a viral pandemic, grief for all who have died and how they have been separated from their loved ones, rage over the systemic killing of black humans, and anger / disbelief that we could have a mentally deranged bully in the Oval Office.
Hard physical labor gets out the angst. Sweat equity makes the zucchini and lettuces taste sweeter than anything we could have others shop for in the store to deliver here. Slowly, the balance is tipping between how much we are cultivating and how much we need to purchase. So far, I haven’t figured out how to grow jars of peanut butter, or cream for the coffee, or, for that matter COFFEE! But perhaps, with enough time and cardboard, even that may be possible. Doesn’t coffee grow on the sides of mountains?
Here’s the thing I marvel at most as I break apart boxes: Some human brain has conceived of a completed, complicated box that has printing on multiple sides, special folding designs so that all that printing is right-side-up when the box is complete, and does the job of holding the product inside.
The most complicated of these marvels appeared recently when I purchased a crate of delicious, organic, Blenheim Apricots from our local produce market. Apart from the sweet treat inside that held snuggly twelve little square cartons of fruit, the complexity of thought that went into the box fascinated me. HOW does a brain visualize that finished product??
In the 1970s, before children, I had a friend in Southern California - a teacher - who moved back to Georgia in the mid ‘80s. She changed careers and became one of those people who designed these marvelous, ingenious, intricate boxes for many and varied products. Del claimed to love her job. She seemed better suited to the interiority of visualization than holding the attention of thirty-five youngsters in a classroom. Del and I stayed in touch for a long time, but lost contact a few years after we visited her in Stone Mountain in 1981 - after her third or fourth move around the state of Georgia. Wishing I could ask her HOW in the world she could wrap her head around the three-dimensional folds, cut-outs, and printing on these boxes, I simply marvel at that ability and am grateful for her skill and others’ skills to do that!
Now, If I could please have all the cut out pieces to put back in place, then the damned weeds might not poke up through the holes!
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