Out in the soil, but still feeling invaded

I’m back in the garden this week, getting the last of my seeds in and continuing to marvel at nature’s powerful language.

It makes sense that another post would come from our backyard, since I use this space to yammer about messages from around me. I’d like this to extend more concretely to ‘us’ someday, but for now we’re pretty much in Michelle’s World at present (until I see some more comments – yes this means you!).

At this time of year, I often benefit from being a home-based worker by spending the first half hour of the morning out among the fronds. It’s the best time to poke around the plants, see what new colour has appeared, and give some help to the droopers (Contrasted with those joyous flowers of last post, droopy ones communicate their own form of pathos with the downward curve and nondescript paleness, as if their petals had been sheathed under transparent tissue paper, then had the texture blown out of them).

Today I heard Bill Carroll on CFRB 1010 AM talking about his Rule of the Backyard. It goes that when you and your neighbour are both in the backyard, you should each do your best to act as though the other was not there. His logic is that in one’s backyard, one often is seeking solitude and privacy. So, even if the fence between you yields a peek or more, you should act as though there’s an invisible shield that keeps you from seeing one another. At the front of the house, on the other hand, it’s okay to approach your neighbour and chat.


An old proverb that still holds true

It’s true that good fences – imaginary or otherwise – make for good neighbours. I had heard a few years back that it’s an expression that translates into more different languages than most. And on further research I found a short piece on this very subject, called "Good fences make good neighbours": history and significance of an ambiguous proverb online – which spoke to the dark side of this saying. I also learned that the expression had been used ironically by Robert Frost in his storied poem, Mending Wall. (Check out the brief entry in Wikipedia about Mending Wall)

I often wish my fences were about two feet higher all around, so that so much cellophane and plastic packaging wouldn’t blow into my garden from others’ waste bins and the schoolyard behind us. My rule in the garden is, “If it’s not natural, it cannot be in my soil.” So I’m seen daily extricating cigarette butts, pieces of newspaper, receipts, shopping bags – you name it – from their former wedged position.

The Brandish Invasion revisited, via the composter

I guess that by removing packaging from the garden, I’m also eliminating brand presence. If you read my series on the Dora phenomenon, you know how I try to keep boundaries between brands and my private space. And I, too, consider the backyard as sacred.

So imagine my annoyance when I emptied my composter last week, and had to spend about ½ hour picking all those little produce stickers out of my fresh yield (“Ah,” says reader, “now I get the choice of photo”), along with doing a second sweep through the garden after dumping compost to ensure I hadn’t missed any. It’d likely be okay if they were pure paper, but many are plasticized in some way, I guess to keep them flexible to stick on uneven and rounded surfaces (think avocado).

I guess it’s better than starting to put all fruit and vegetables into packages in order to identify their source. But what a pain in the a**. Certainly, food more than anything else needs its source properly identified, if for no other reason than to know who to go after if you get sick after eating it. But imagine all the labels that got missed by other faithful composters. And imagine how many hours are spent at municipal waste management centres, peeling those little stickers off the contents of our green bins so that they can be properly fed back into the earth.

I went to an outdoor education camp as a teenager, and at the time I also smoked. I remember we went on a nighthike, and the leader telling us that if we absolutely had to smoke, we should pocket our butts afterwards. Evidently, it takes decades for the artificial material in the filters to even begin to biodegrade.

I wonder how long those stickers take to start decomposing. Maybe the next person to own our house will get turned onto Turbana bananas, too, while digging up our garden.

The lesson? Peel those puppies off as soon as you take the produce out to eat, and put them in the trash where they belong. The critical view? Labels find their way everywhere, even where you don’t expect them to.