How Growing Plants Makes you a Better Person
“Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Perhaps you already know that my partner Juan and I built and live at a place called Sueño de Vida, a thirty-acre reforestation project and regenerative farm in Ecuador. If you didn’t know that we’ve planted thousands of trees in a diverse and productive food forest on what was degraded pasture land, well, now you do. And if that’s all you know about me, you might have some notions, very reasonable notions, that I studied botany or horticulture or agronomy. Or that I grew up on a farm or in a family that grew their own food. Or, for whatever reason, that I’m doing something radical and beyond the reach of most people, including you.
When people visit our project here in Ecuador they inevitably ask me. But how did you learn how to do all this? Did you go to school for it? Then you worked on farms? Then where?
House plants, I like to reply. I want people to know exactly how humble my beginnings were. It all started with a few house plants. From house plants I progressed to tiny urban gardens. After a few "practice years" my tiny urban gardens were growing so much food I rarely bought produce for nearly half the year. Then I threw caution to the wind and went big, really big. Hectares big. Anyone can do any part of it, including you.
Now, I’m a pragmatic and very honest person. I’m not going to sell you on the idea of growing food at home with some simplistic hook like “All I ever needed to know I learned from my first garden.” In general, everything is specific. When I moved here to Ecuador, I had to learn the specifics of regenerating land not just on a much larger scale, but on sub-tropical cloud forest land with which I had exactly zero experience.
What gardening had taught me up to that point was far more valuable than the specifics of regenerating a cloud forest. To put it very simply, being a gardener — even on a very small scale — made me a smarter and better person. A decade of daily yoga practice had made me physically flexible and honed my body’s intelligence to a fine edge. In yoga, we learn to “look within” so that’s what I strived to do. But in my ability to see outside myself, to observe patterns in nature and draw conclusions from them, I was just as clueless as any other long-time city dweller.
If you’ve ever lived in a large city, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s this weird discombobulation of feeling overstimulated by light and noise — the sirens, the helicopters, the traffic — and at the same time understimulated because everything becomes so routine. By necessity, we lock ourselves into schedules and to-do lists, and the rote repetition over time makes us feel dull and sad. Our senses, overwhelmed with data and the urgency to process it into something usable, narrow down to perceive nothing more than what we need to do to get through the day without going crazy.
Gardening slows you down. To garden well you must also cultivate mental flexibility, an ability to meet challenges as they arise and find new ways of doing things when circumstances change. Gardening is a complete sensory experience that invites you not only to observe nature, but to engage with it as a participant and creator. The smell of the soil, the hum of the insects, the textures of the myriad leaves and petals and the first firm ripe fruit — it all draws you into a world so inherently full of power, cycles, and revelations. But the garden is also quietly powerful, it doesn’t press or demand. It easily slips into the pattern of your life and changes you for the better. Plus, you can eat from it. How wonderful is that?
The most profound and lasting gift being a gardener gave me was the gradual awakening and expansion of my senses to the natural world. By taking me outside of myself, by putting me there in the soil I will one day become, gardening put me back into my self. Of far more importance than the practical knowledge I share in my book, gardening gave me the confidence and the courage to learn how to learn all over again.
More than anything else, any facts or techniques, it’s that confidence and courage I hope to impart to you.
So I’ll tell you my story of how I became a gardener and some practical wisdoms I picked up along the way. If you choose to walk down this path, you will undoubtedly intuit your own truths to serve as your guide. My story is only one.
House Plants from Home Depot
Like many urban folk, I tended to move around a lot. Sure, I could blame gentrification and rising rents, but in all honesty I also liked to move. Semi-nomadism kept me feeling light, unfettered by too much stuff. The only things I always took with me were my house plants.
They weren’t anything special, just the typical evergreen indoor plants you see in big box home improvement stores, languishing under the fluorescent bulbs with their roots bursting out of their confining plastic trays. Since I moved around a lot, generally avoiding the “gut reno” type apartments and their astronomical rent, the only “home” items I ever went to the Home Depot for were paint and plants. Another good thing about non-renovated apartments besides affordable rent: landlords who didn’t care if I painted a wall or two. So after perusing the bargain bin of reject paint mixes for the perfect shade of apricot or periwinkle, I’d wheel my cavernous cart with the one can of paint and roller/tray/brush kit over to the tables of house plants and...sigh. Oh, the poor things.
I wanted to buy them all. Every time. I remember the feeling, like trying to choose just one stray at a shelter. I even had a rule: if I picked a plant up and looked at it, if I give it even a glimmer of hope of a better life, well, I had to buy it. I didn’t pick the best ones of the bad lot, no, I would deliberately choose the most shriveled-leafed, root-bound plants there. I just knew if I lavished enough love and affection on them, they would flourish and be happy.
And flourish they did. I still think about it with a touch of pride. Every pathetic struggling plant I ever brought “home” with me thrived with a little extra TLC.
One evening, after yet another voluntary relocation, my friend Deana came by my new place for a visit. The floor was strewn with boxes, but I had just re-potted my house plants and they were looking especially spiffy, shiny bright green and lush. My friend admired them. “Your plants look really good,” she remarked, “Where did you get them?” As a landscape architect, she had a professional interest. “From Home Depot,” I replied, “they were pretty pitiful, but they’re doing better now.” She was surprised. “Really? I thought you got them at a nursery. The plants at Home Depot are like the dregs.” Only because they’re in prison, I thought silently. “So,” she asked, “how do you get them so healthy?”
I thought back to the night before. The shabby English basement I had moved into was only a block from one of DC’s many access points to Rock Creek Park, a winding wooded trail that quietly transverses most of the city. Right after I lugged in the last box and spent an hour finding a no-tow zone to park the rented U-Haul, I walked to the park with a couple of shopping bags. It was after midnight but there was a moon. Leaf fall and undergrowth carpeted the ground, the smell of damp decay beckoned.
I found a deadfall of old wood, and under it exactly what I was looking for: loose black fragrant earth. With my hands I scooped some into my bags. I wasn’t much of an eco-activist at the time, but some nascent reverence for nature always kept me from taking too much at once. I’d scrape a little from one spot, a bit more from another spot, taking care not to disturb spiderwebs shimmering in the cool bright moonlight.
Then I lay back on the ground and looked up at the sky cut into isosceles triangles by the tree branches. A ragtag gang of deer trip-trapped past me, their shadows stretched long over the trail. The deer in Rock Creek Park don’t look anything like Bambi’s parents, they always reminded me more of pirates, seasoned raiders of wheeled garbage bins. Trip-trap, trip-trap they went by into the night. I stretched my body against the ground and breathed in the petrichor and moss, rich and clean-smelling. I had all sorts of reasons to be anxious about where my life was going at the time, but they didn’t matter then or there. I felt good and vital and alive.
I didn’t tell Deana all that. I just said, “I take a little soil when I go for walks in Rock Creek. I think it has good stuff in it for the plants.” She concurred. “Well, sure. If you buy leaf compost, that’s pretty much what you’re getting from the park. It is good stuff.”
Good stuff. That was what I called it. I didn’t have a garden of any size back then. I didn’t know anything at all about soil or how to improve it. I followed my nose to the good stuff.
That’s how I started to learn the most important lesson of all: to use and trust my senses.
“You know,” I said tentatively, gesturing toward the back door. “There’s a little space outdoors. I’m thinking maybe I could plant some things out there…”
That's how it all started.
The More the Merrier
The space was tiny: two 3’ x 2’ weedy beds boxed in by splintery wood. There was a sickly rosebush and a mildew infested hydrangea, both of which were past saving, even for me. I found an old hand saw under the front porch and cut them down, reveling in the smell of earth and the scurry of ground beetles. I tore out the weeds and stirred the soil, unearthing several marbles, an entire set of Go-Bots, and multiple rings of keys. I found some old gardening books at a sidewalk sale and began to educate myself about annuals and perennials, soil types, and planting zones. I was intoxicated and completely obsessed with the idea of transforming this piece of junk into my own miniature Arcadia. And after some fits and starts and quite a few failures, I did.
The tiny clumps of herbs I bought at the neighborhood farmer’s market took hold first. I will never ever forget the first evening I stepped outside my dark kitchen to the scent of thyme, oregano, lemon balm, sage, lavender...wow, I thought, this is...this is...wow.
The tightly planted clusters grew large and lush. And then there was the yarrow, the coneflowers, the pretty alyssum, the sprawling nasturtium which I restrained by eating a handful of leaves and flowers every day. And more — I can’t quite remember everything, but it was all growing in a jubilant profusion, like a big herbal bouquet. The plants didn’t look crowded. They looked quite pleased to have each other’s company. Bumblebees and butterflies began to stop by, every day. Nary a weed bared its scraggly head.
That’s how I learned that diversity isn’t just pretty — it’s effective. And I learned that to keep plants I didn’t want out of my garden all I needed to do was fill the space with the plants I wanted.
A Watched Pot Never Boils
There wasn’t much space for vegetables, but I was intrigued by the idea of growing things vertically. I planted Scarlet Runner beans because I liked the name and the picture on the seed packet showing them climbing a wooden picket fence. My fence was rusted chain link, but I figured it would work just as well. Summer came and with it the typical DC stifling sweltering heat. The basil came on strong, but no beans. I forgot all about them. When I did go out to sit with my garden, the heat would promptly put me into a drowsy unseeing trance.
Until a day when coming out of one of these somnolent dazes, I saw right in front of me, dangling from a muscular vine wrapped around the gutter pipe of the second floor balcony, a lone glistening green bean. A HUGE green bean. Along the length of the vine were several more, all enormous and beautiful. Here and there the vine also sported bright red flowers shaped like small trumpets. I plucked one and sniffed it. It smelled sweet and good, like honeysuckle. I nibbled and it tasted sweet and good too.
That was how I learned that gardener’s don’t grow food. We just plant the seeds and step back to let it happen.
Italian Food
I took a bowl outside and harvested the beans. I had enough to eat and then some. The next day another friend came by to give me a ride to a gym where we both taught yoga. On impulse, I tossed two handfuls of beans into a bag and gave them to my friend. I felt a little shy about it. I had never shared anything I grew myself before. I thought my beans were amazing of course, just like parents think their kids are wonderful. But would other people like them too?
The next time I saw my friend he quickly put my fear to rest. “Those beans you gave me were so good,” he marveled. “How did you grow them?” I was confused. “I don’t know. In the dirt.” I shrugged. “No, I mean what else did you grow them with?” my friend pressed, “I didn’t even season them, I just steamed them and they tasted like Italian food.”
Something tugged at my memory. Where had I planted those seeds? When I got home that night I went right out to the garden. It was late summer and the cicadas were deafening. The bean-laden vines were climbing over everything at that point. Patiently (a virtue I’m more usually lacking), I traced the sprawling vines to their origin. I smiled. I grinned. My friend was onto something. The roots of the central vine were sharing space with a flowering and fragrant cluster of rosemary and oregano.
I plucked a sprig or two of the herbs, rubbed them hard in between my palms, put my hands to my nose, and inhaled. Ahhhhhh. Like a good zesty marinara sauce. Then I plucked a bean and sniffed it. Smiled again. It carried the same unmistakable scent as the herbs. Not quite as clear and potent, but present nonetheless. Italian food indeed.
That’s when I understood that the garden is much more than meets the eye. I discovered that plants have relationships and the life in the garden is interconnected.
And I remembered how delightful it can be to feel surprise.
Accidents Happen… and that’s OK
Fall came and the big leaves of the fig tree fell, making a blanket that covered the sage and artemisia I had planted underneath. The temperature fell at night and in the mornings, a light frost bloomed. The rosemary and oregano grew brittle and withdrew for the winter as it got colder. The basil froze and shattered. But the sage and artemisia under the scant boughs of the fig tree continued to live, their silvery foliage poking out from their down comforter of leaf fall.
That is how I learned that thick mulch keeps soil warm and can prolong the growing season. More importantly, I learned that when something good happens by accident, the gardener can often copy it to make the same thing happen on purpose.
Every fall from that point on, I mulched my garden generously and was still harvesting hardy roots and greens for Thanksgiving and even into winter.
Things Have a Life of their Own
The next year I moved. Again. Away from my beloved little Arcadia. I had spent countless hours there, digging, working, and learning. And I was leaving it for whatever might happen next.
Was it all for nothing?
Of course not.
It was a gift for the next person to live there. Perhaps they would appreciate it, perhaps not.
There would still be the birds, the beetles and the earthworms to find food and shelter there. And for the fungi and the most humble soil microbe to do their quiet work that makes the riot of spring possible.
Three years later, I spent the summer dog-sitting in a house in the same neighborhood where I planted my first garden. Every evening, I took the two little pooches for a good walk. One night, I cut through the alley behind my old apartment. Dragging my fingers along the old chain link fence, I stopped. I could smell the garden before I saw it. I would know that smell anywhere: the citrus of lemon balm, the lavender like a fine talc, and slicing through these soft perfumes, the sharp oregano, acrid artemisia, and astringent rosemary.
Amazed, I gazed at the garden. A few tall weeds poked through here and there, but they had hardly taken over. What had taken over were the tiny perennial herbs I had planted. The lavender was a three foot high shrub towering over a creeping spread of thyme. A nearly complete circle of silver artemisia around the base of the fig tree shone in the faint light. It was not only still there, it had easily tripled itself in size and vigor.
That’s how I learned that things have a life of their own. It was simply a matter of waking up their souls — and mine too.
Of course there is much more to the story. This is only the very beginning. But I think it’s sufficient to relate that my even my first incarnation as a gardener imparted much wisdom that guides me still today, even in a much larger scale project like Sueño de Vida.
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Sueño de Vida offers a fully online Food Forest at Home course that breaks the art of permaculture gardening down for you into the most practical and actionable steps. With engaging explanations of how to do everything from make a space to keeping weeds in check to naturally saving seed, our course takes you through the entire growing season journey from early spring to late fall. Also loaded with planting guides, easy-to-follow tables, and short demonstration videos, this learning experience is designed to show you how to nurture your own green space with ease and joy
At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building, year-round soil cover with plants and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Kristen Krash is the co-founder and director of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative cacao farm and reforestation mission in Ecuador. Sueño de Vida works to educate and inspire everyday people about permaculture, sustainable living, environmental activism and healthy living all in the name of living more in harmony with nature to create a better world for us all.