How to endure unrelenting cold? I know there have been casualties, but the birds still throng the feeders, and the indomitable squirrels still keep coming for the spillage.

The wild ones may be as sick of cold as I am, but, in their stoic way, they grin and bear it...

...while we order seeds, and imagine growing them. Indoor seed starting time only 5 weeks away.

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GENE LOGSDON

The Contrary Farmer

1993

It is in the garden that we get down on our hands and knees and feel the soil draw us into an understanding of the interrelationships between all living things. One generality that comes close to being always true in my experience is that farmers who do not garden or who have never gardened, tend to be insensitive to the biological nature of their work and therefore inattentive to all nature including human nature. Urbanites who do not garden are even worse in this regard since they have no frame of reference at all for coming to grips with the realities of biology. They not only don't understand what farmers are up against, but cannot see that these problems are everybody's concern.

On the other hand, the more gardeners immerse themselves in their biological art, the more they not only understand farmers but become farmers — nurturers of life. Indeed, no matter how small the garden, even as small as a miniature planting of mosses inside a gallon jar, the biological activity going on there is a microcosm of the farm. It seems to me that the garden is the only practical way for urban societies to come in close contact with the basic realities of life, and if that contact is not close, it is not meaningful at all. To feel the searing heat as well as the comforting warmth of the sun, or to endure the dry wind as well as the soothing breeze; to pray for rain but not too much rain; to long for a spate of dry weather but not too long; to listen to the music of nature as well as the rock beat of human culture; to know that life depends on eating and being eaten; to accept the decay of death as the only way to achieve the resurrection of life; to realize that diversification of species, not multiplication within a species, is the responsibility of rational intelligence—nature will handle that latter activity much better than we can; to grow in personal simplicity while appreciating biological complexity, so that in the garden there is time to sit and think, to produce good food for the mind—these are all part of an education that the industrial world hungers for but cannot name.