MOFGA members will identify with the love of plants and lessons learned from them that Nicole Vinci, a recent graduate of Unity College, expresses. Vinci was awarded the 2007 Campus Enrichment Award at Unity for her dedicated work in the greenhouse there. English photo.

My Plants, My Teachers

by Nicole Vinci

By having a green thumb my whole life, I’ve been able to create beauty through horticulture; and now, owning dozens of plants, I have discovered that they’re my teachers. If I had my own way, my whole apartment would be a forest of plants. If I had a desk job, I’d be that person dedicating my working hours to watering, feeding and talking to the plants that create a garden wall instead of having a cubical separator around my desk.

Plants have taught me patience, dedication and faith:

• Patience comes while waiting for my plants to bloom.
• Dedication is required because owning plants is much like having a pet that needs daily attention, and if I want to go on vacation, I have to think first about my plants: Who’s going to water and care for them? Dedication quickly turns into a daily routine and pays off in the long run.
• As for having faith, a friend came to me and said, “I’m killing this plant. Please, can you save it?” After I had cared for it for a few weeks, the plant dropped all its leaves and looked dead. I didn’t give up; I watered it every day. For a month and a half, I watched, hoping to see it growing leaves. About the second month, sure enough, this little stump formed new growth almost overnight. Much like this plant and my experience with it, we all go through rough times, and we each need to hold faith in ourselves and in each other. Having faith through the rough times, in our own lives, enables us to keep going and to grow.

Through all these life experiences from my teachers – my plants – I have grown attached to them. Like the cat-loving neighbor who collects every stray she comes across, I feel a connection with plants, and I have to resist the urge to take them all home. My teachers have given me a new, inspiring sense of myself. I’ve found a dedication and love for caring for plants. Now, with my plants as my true teachers, I have to care for their survival.

Faith and dedication will bring a payoff, but it requires time, effort and patience in waiting for that picture-perfect bloom. That’s what plants have taught me about life.

About the author: Nicole Vinci is a 2007 graduate of Unity College in Unity, Maine. She received the 2007 Campus Enrichment Award at Unity for her dedication in working in the greenhouse there.

True Costs

Russell Libby
MOFGA Executive Director

I’ve been making some new garden beds this spring. A few times my youngest daughter, Rosa, now 16, has come out to help. Each time we turn a piece of sod, she picks up the worms that we uncover and carefully moves them to the newly prepared ground.

A classic book of English farming lore is The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis. In an agriculture of life, the death of the worm is part of a cycle that creates the conditions for the growth of the plant, the animal and the human.

Contrast that with the current approach to most agriculture in the United States. The typical farmer in most of the country is planting corn or soybeans about now. Fertility comes from the factory, in the form of anhydrous ammonia or urea. Herbicides are used to kill any non-crop weeds. Several applications of insecticides ensure some marketable yield at the end of the summer. Over half the soybeans and about two-thirds of the corn are genetically engineered for herbicide resistance, and a large portion of the corn has also been engineered with a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium to make an insecticidal toxin.

The results? We have plenty of corn for livestock and for food processing. We have a boom in ethanol plants, and a call to allow land set aside for soil conservation to be used for corn production. We also have a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico where fertilizers flow from farm fields across the Midwest down the Mississippi River. We have over a dozen weeds that are now resistant to Roundup, the herbicide of choice, after less than a decade of Roundup-Ready soy and corn. New recommendations suggest adding more manganese fertilizer to soybean plantings to offset the tendency of Roundup to eliminate a high percentage of the soil organisms that would naturally make manganese available to soybeans.

This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s birth. She used the absence of a robin from the environment as a symbol of what would go wrong with indiscriminate applications of pesticides like DDT. Maybe we need a new symbol, one that reflects the overall health of the life of the soil. Who votes for the earthworm?

After the Maine Legislature held its hearing on LD 1650, An Act to Amend the Laws Concerning Genetically Engineered Plants and Seeds, I went home and reread parts of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. At the hearing, Department and industry representatives implied that there are no issues to be concerned about with genetically engineered crops, and that all of us who were there to raise those issues were doing so out of narrow self-interest, trying to make it harder to grow crops conventionally and forcing people to organics. They feared a schism between conventional and organic farmers, and wanted to avoid any kind of divisive discussions.

If speaking up for the entire biota, as Carson and Leopold did, is enough to create a schism, then there is something wrong with the “conventional” approach to agriculture. And if we can’t have open and honest discussions about issues, what does that say for the kind of democracy we are practicing?

When Dr. Matt Liebman was doing research at the University of Maine on potato ecosystems, he kept looking and looking for worms in potato fields and couldn’t find them. Maybe that’s one simple test of whether we’re on the right track. It’s a test that Cooperative Extension is recommending in its soil quality assessments.

English farmer John Stewart Collis plowed, and knew the full cost. We are creating an agriculture where no one knows the true costs until decades after the fact. That is fundamentally wrong. It’s a discussion we need to have, openly.

At the end of the day, if the agriculture we practice takes the health of the worms in the soil into account, like Rosa does in our garden, then we’ll have possibilities for the future.