“DO YOU MAKE any money from it?” a visitor asked as we walked behind my house, where goats, chickens, fruits, and vegetables grow among the weeds. I shook my head and laughed.
We entered the garden where my 74-year-old father knelt, breaking up soil with an old cultivating fork. He was planting spindly tomato plants I had started from seed and almost abandoned.
We don’t make money from it, but the garden is the place where my father cultivates joy. When I was a child, he poured water on rows of collards to wash away stressful days working for a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. Gardening restores his soul. These days, Dad splits his time between my parents’ home in Ohio and my home in rural Georgia, planting gardens in both places.
We don’t weigh the bushels of okra, cantaloupe, peppers, watermelon, and beans to see if they equal or surpass expenditures of time or money spent on Dad’s trips down South. Some work can’t be measured in dollars.
In her poem “Photosynthesis,” Ashley M. Jones, the poet laureate of Alabama, remembers her father’s garden: “The difference, now: my father is not a slave, / not a sharecropper. This land is his and so is this garden, / so is this work. The difference is that he owns this labor.”
There must be another phrase than “hobby farmer” to express the spiritual satisfaction of freely gardening, especially for people carrying centuries of trauma connected to the land. African American farmers make up less than 2 percent of farmers in the U.S. Places like Soul Fire Farm in New York, or EARTHseed Farm in California, use methods rooted in African and Indigenous ways to repair centuries of harm. Practices like heavy mulching, planting cover crops, and growing a variety of plants help soil to recover from heavy tilling and monoculture. The slow, small-scale farming my father does isn’t even included in the “2 percent.” Yet, our little farm joins other plots of liberation, places of healing for people and the land itself.
From my desk window, I watch my dad wade through the green. Though I try to hide it with nail polish, my fingers are cracked, with an earth-brown patina staining the grooves of my fingerprints. I walk out to join him. Other work pulls at me: deadlines, emails, and writing. But I stop to pull weeds. An hour later, I’m more at peace, ready to face the work waiting at my desk.
“What you call waste, / I call power. What you call work I make beautiful again,” Jones writes in “Photosynthesis.” I probably earn less money because of the time I spend in the garden. But my dad is teaching me that living a life you love is a way to make a good living.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
