Talking Yards....

“We’re talking YARDS” I said to my friend Richard Harriman on the phone the other day as we discussed the possible solutions to Lindsay’s - and the Valley’s - large constellation of problems.  
He thought promoting community gardens here might be one way to bring people together and reconnect them with land, the source of everything (provided you have water to irrigate with and drink.)  I like the idea of community gardens and have seen them work beautifully, especially with urban people who need to reconnect with both people and land more than they need to grow food.  
But when people are hungry, what they need more than anything is a little piece of land outside their backdoor to plant, water and harvest from, to share their surplus with neighbors and to guard from no-account garden rustlers with a polite little fence, their presence, and maybe a barking dog.  It’s the reason I’ve been afraid if we become a nation of apartment-dwellers.  He saw what I was talking about.
I was invited into just such a yard last week by the father of my friend Robert Diaz, who lives just down the street.  I learned the Spanish names for persimmons and pomegranates, smelled twigs from herbs for making menudo and calming an upset stomach, and noted the care and understanding he had for each individual plant.  The tiny strips of land he has to plant are dense with food-in-progress.  Afterward it came to me that there’s an inverse relation between care and land:  the less land you have, the more you care about it.  
One of our great national agrarians, Wendell Berry, has a name for that relationship he calls “eyes per acre.”  What he means is that there is an appropriate ratio between people and land, a proper number of people needed to care for an amount of land.  If the number of people drops or the amount of land increases beyond that ratio, everything suffers.  The industrial form and scale of agriculture here in the Tulare Lake Basin bears testimony to this idea.
Luckily for us, the readers of this paper, we have a pioneering voice for the importance of yards in Mo Montgomery, who most weeks puts together her column “Steadfast” come heck or high water like I do.  Mo has turned her passion for the lifestyle-change movement known as urban homesteading into a consciousness-raising effort that comes free with your subscription.  The words she’s putting out there are making ideas available from around the country that she’s kitchen-testing and yard-testing right here in our own climate.  Check out her website for even more exposure to this life-changing movement at www.blkcatcottage.com.
Our “Gardening Guru” column by UC Master Gardener Michelle Le Strange is also helpful with yards and their tending, frequently complementing Mo’s work to put us in touch with the truths of our lives.  
The work of  both women reminds me how important it is that we begin to realize - and soon - the tremendous value of the land we occupy and the water we claim:  that we inhabit a paradise that some would just as soon pave over to put up a parking lot.