(Tomatoes at the County Fair.)
“Shepherd your people with your staff,
the flock that belongs to you,
which lives alone in a forest
in the midst of a garden land;
let them feed in Bashan and Gilead
as in the days of old.
As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt,
show us marvelous things.
The nations shall see and be ashamed
of all their might;
they shall lay their hands on their mouths;
their ears shall be deaf…” –Micah 7:14
What is wealth? The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “affluence,” which in turn it defines as “A plentiful supply of material goods… an abundance.” We seek wealth, and we seek to secure that wealth– yet the way we go about it to often defeats our purposes.
We seek wealth from other places, from the fruits of others’ labor and from the resources of other nations. But we have wealth right here at home if we would only look for it. Wealth is abundance, and we can grow an abundance of food in almost any part of this great nation, from cities to rural areas. But too often we don’t. We ignore the wealth at our fingertips and focus instead on wealth generated in California, Mexico, Chile, and New Zealand. We spend our hard-earned cash on supposed luxuries from other places, when we could have the same or similar items right here at home– and our money would stay in our community or, better yet, in our pockets.
What makes a head of iceberg lettuce from California better than the pesticide-free green- or red-leaf lettuce you can grow on your windowsill? Absolutely nothing. What makes a cardboard store-bought California or Mexicdo tomato better than what you can grow in your garden or on your patio? The store-bought tomato can’t even come close.
Those who have wealth seek to deprive us of ours by making us believe that we can’t, shouldn’t, or don’t have time to grow our own food. In my book, real security is having what you need without having to worry about whether you can pay for it.
I love my garden. It’s a series of raised beds that are easy to tend and, with a few garden sprinkler parts, easy to water. I have enough seeds that I won’t need to buy any for five years (though every year I seem to find more that I can’t live without). Once it’s set up, it costs almost nothing to maintain year after year. And though the weather can be fickle, every year we get something of value from our garden, from tomatoes and onions last year to cucumbers and peppers the year before. And every bite from my garden is food we don’t have to buy– and it tastes far better than what they sell in the store.
In Paragonah, there’s a backyard business called Red Creek Nursery. The woman who runs it starts plants over the winter and sells them to gardeners in the spring. They cost about the same as Wal-Mart, are better tended and more acclimated to the local climate. And the money we pay her stays right here in town. The same is true of the farmer’s market and the local produce stands.
What’s even better is when we trade fresh produce with our neighbors. Last year, our cucumbers died in a late frost, so we traded salsa for cucumbers from one of our friends in town. We both came out winners: they got slasa they wouldn;t otherwise have made, and we got to make pickles that the weather had otherwise denied us. And the cost: nothing at all. We also got apples, cherries, and tomatoes from people who had too many– and we gave away onions and rhubarb.
I’m not entirely sure what the prophet Micah meant when he counseled the people to feed themselves so that the nations might be ashamed. But I like to think that he was reminding us that we don’t necessarily need a national or global economy to create wealth: we can find our economic security right here at home.
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