Thanks to the Hobart gardening legend Hannah Moloney sharing a video about the green tomatoes in her greenhouse, I went outside in the glorious winter solstice sunshine today, down in the Huon Valley, and rummaged around in the crazily overgrown tomato plant that has been taking over my neglected compost heap. I came away with a basket full of unripe cherry tomatoes. This will be an experiment: leaving them in the sun to ripen, if they will. I wouldn’t dare to say “I grew tomatoes”. These plants grew themselves: more than one friend has said that volunteer tomatoes, those self-seeded, are the most determined (or obstinate).
It puts me in mind of how adamant I was when hiring a professional builder to not say it was me doing the building – more accurately, I would say I was having a tiny house built. These are subtle and incredibly important nuances to language, which of course imply ownership and ability. Icannot grow tomatoes, and it would be awfully strange if I could. Perhaps I can put more effort into intentionally creating the conditions in which tomatoes would like to grow, but based on last year’s experiments, that is currently in question. The only tomato plants to bear fruit under my gaze in the southern hemisphere are self-seeded, and my gaze wasn’t really upon them until Hannah’s cheerful greenhouse clip made me think about going to check out the plants growing in superabundance out of the compost.
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I’m not the first to say that everything we need is at our fingertips. Of course I speak from a region and locality with a generous abundance of natural rainfall and fertile soil, even if, depending on your patch, there may be recent traces of agricultural chemicals to reckon with. The crisis around fertiliser due to the closure of the strait of Hormuz is interesting to me, who has the privilege to contemplate the problem at a distance: I do understand that it is talking about industrial-scale farming and industrial level amounts of fertiliser, but I also think that scale is often the problem for anything, whether it is folks on Grand Designs bankrupting themselves or people forgetting that when dealt with correctly, the best fertiliser comes from our own digestive systems as humanure. Again, this is an issue of scale: large-scale human waste breeding cholera is no good, and sewerage systems for urban areas were a great and necessary part of the Industrial Revolution.
The small things, sometimes, are things we can remedy. This is partly why so many folks turned towards gardening during the 2020 pandemic, and perhaps why so many more continue to do so. It isn’t “prepping” to plant some chard or to crop-swap lettuces: it’s natural community exchange, which is often cited as our single greatest “answer” to the existential worries we face (community, not lettuce, though both are good).
And while I agree with Sarah Wilson’s latest book about civilisational collapse, it is important to remember that we’re talking more about “the fall of Rome” than “dinosaurs wiped out by meteor” – there are likely to be pockets and communities of folks all over the globe still surviving on rainwater catchment, humanure and gardening after Silicon Valley completes the ouroboros and eats its own tail; after the datacentres suck the rivers dry and then fry themselves under their own hyper-consumption.
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Again, I do not wish for these things to happen (it glosses over an enormous amount of human and non-human suffering) and good people are doing a lot to try to stop them, but the longer tail of this is that such rapaciousness is non-negotiably unsustainable.
The greatest privilege I have is time with my child; I have this time because I choose to live with very little money, because I work part-time, making me available for my child. I have little by way of assets, but also no mortgage. There is a small personal debt I am slowly inching my way along paying off, and I put great store in social capital. While this limits me in some ways – for example, flying on holidays is currently a theory, loaded with complex feelings thanks to having family and friends abroad – there is a relative simplicity in what I understand to be important.
If, as wise folks say, attention is a form of prayer, then I know that turning my attention to my child and my compost tomatoes are one way forward. I may not know the future, but I know keeping my attention there will not be a poor choice.
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