frankly i'm a bit concerned

admittedly it isn't very far into winter yet...but it has been disturbingly mild...the snow of a few days ago is long gone ( it's raining right now) and the winter wheat i planted in mid october continues to grow...no dormancy yet, and it's getting on to over eight inches tall...so is winter going to be back-loaded with nasty weather? could be...somewhere in here i need some snow to insulate the winter wheat from the coming cold...dry winters are no friend to the plants...it is an important part of my organic fertility and if i seem weirdly concerned, that's why...i took advantage of the day to lay down another layer of mulch around my blueberry bushes, erring on the side of caution.


"the experience of the sublime is all about nature having her way with us, about the sensation of awe before her power-about feeling small. what i'm talking about is the opposite, and amittedly more dubious, satisfaction of having our way with nature: the pleasure of beholding the reflection of our labor and intelligence in the land. in the same way that niagara or everest stirs the first impulse, the farmer's methodical rows stitching the hills or the allees of pollarded trees ordering a garden like versailles, excite the second, filling us with our power. these days the sublime is mostly a kind of vacation, both in a literal and a moral sense. after all, who has a bad word to say about wilderness anymore? by comparison, this other impulse, the desire to exert our control over nature's wilderness, bristles with ambiguity. we're unsure about our power in nature,it's legitimacy and it's reality..."
michael pollan form "the botany of desire" pp. 183-184

so is that what i'm doing in the garden? imposing my will on nature and forcing her to yield up sustenance? proving human mastery ( and ramshackle stewardship) over the earth? i thought i was trying to work through ( though manipulating) biological processes to create some sort of food security...that is why , i believe, humans turned to horticulture and agriculture...to create an artificial carrying capacity to feed themselves and their growing numbers of kin more fully...that this led to a further increase in mouths to feed and a stratified society and specialization of labor and the rise of priestly and aristocratic classes was largely an unintended by-product of a successful experiment that created more food than subsistence required...and it's with that priestly caste that humans were removed from nature and put in charge of it...not with the act of bending nature a bit to try to guarantee a bit more to eat...i'm still inside nature out in my back yard..just asking her to co-operate a bit...and she does. albeit sometimes grudgingly and not without reminding me who's still in charge with late blight and potato beetle larvae...no...i'm asking here not demanding...monsanto and cargil are doing quite enough of that