Gardening is a weirdly political space in particularly the American landscape. On the one hand, some of the most wholesome people you will see are garden people. There’s something about a guy who really just wants to grow cool cabbages that is just delightful.
On the other hand, there’s a whole political…thing, especially with women, in which gardening gets called “homesteading,” which harks to a non-existent past as well as our present misery.
So to be clear: I am opposed to the concept and history of homesteading. Historical homesteading in the US served multiple functions. First, to push native populations off their ancestral, and in some cases, treaty lands. Second, to prop up overbuilt railways and get return on investment for wealthy people by bilking hopeful laborers of their savings. Third, to get otherwise angry young men people of cities where they might foment rebellion against the wealthy with empty promises.
In US history, homesteading was awful for everyone involved. Families would take their savings and head out west; their savings would swiftly be spent on things that couldn’t be made on a homestead (everything from salt pork to threshers to fabric) and at that point, they would start entering debt. Many, many homesteads were in terrible debt. People worked themselves to death or died because they weren’t prepared for winter on the plains. They gave up claims or sold them at a loss and decamped.
No homesteaders were self-sufficient. It was not possible for them to be self-sufficient; they were deeply reliant on the railways, and the railways were very happy to make them so. But homesteads meant that people were promised that you might someday become a wealthy landowner, if only you would put in the hard work to make so.
In reality, homesteading was a serious part of what destroyed the native soil of the plains in parts of Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas and, as the nation entered drought conditions, helped bring about the Dust Bowl in the Great Depression.
And yet this enduring myth has survived—one of a golden time of “self sufficiency” that in reality relied on impoverishing hopeful farmers, stealing from American Indians, and enriching railway barons.
And I despair at this, because in many ways, planting things—things that belong, things that work in the environment where they are planted, things that make human lives better—is the most hopeful thing we can do.
Fruit trees are a much better way to understand the world than our rosy-glowed view of homesteads.
For one, they are an act of caring for the future. They won’t feed you this year. They won’t feed you next year. You will probably forget that they might feed you (if you are me and you have ADHD) until one day, you are out in your garden and you say “what the heck? Where did all these plums come from?”
For another, fruit trees won’t make you self sufficient. You cannot survive on nothing but plums; they don’t provide all the essential nutrients you need. They’re just really delicious and once the onslaught starts, you’ll have pounds and pounds and pounds of plums, and oh god, please, will the plums STOP, I cannot take this many plums!
So of course, you will start to share. You will bring giant bags of plums to your friends’ houses. You will be excited about a trip to visit a different state because it gives you a new category of victims—uh, I mean, giftees—for your plums.
Fruit trees require you to give things away, and really, isn’t that so much better than self-sufficiency?
My theory on gardening is the inverse of homesteading. I don’t want to be self-sufficient. I don’t even want to try. I want to grow things, knowing that a bunch of things won’t make it, but I might end up with a hundred pounds of zucchini that I can gift to the local food pantry.
That’s what I believe in: not a garden that miraculously and improbably takes care of every single one of my own needs, but gives a little bit of joy to a bunch of people.
