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---
title: Voice of the Tribe — Daniel Vitalis
date: 2014-06-08T15:31:02Z
source: http://www.danielvitalis.com/blog/voice-of-the-tribe-rewilding-my-garden
tags: gardening
---
And yet, everything I feel inside has me aching to reconnect with the natural rhythms of the world, a desire that only grows sharper the more time I spend with my hands in the dirt. Watching plants grow and life forms interact has changed my entire perspective as a human. In a sense, I feel _more _human because of my time in the garden. I experience different emotions and entertain new lines of questioning while I pick beans and listen to birds.
So, how can I have it both ways? How can I grow food, medicine and habitat without overriding Nature? How can I carefully forge myself into the role of 'gardener' within Her bounds?
To start, by un-learning and re-thinking everything I know about gardening.
My mental outlook on the day my shovel broke sod was likely the same as most home gardeners: I wanted to be healthy. I wanted time outdoors, a relationship with my land, and of utmost importance — control over my food.
But unlike most home gardeners, I had a different idea of what 'wild' meant and the role it would play in my garden. I was returning home after many years on the road, living in a van and exploring national parks and scenic wonders. (To be fair, I ate, clothed, and bathed myself at truck stops and Wal-Mart's from coast-to-coast, which is why being healthy had shot to the top of my list.) My experiences from working street fairs each weekend had tuned me in to this one defining idea:
Other people thought that I was 'wild' because my life didn't include the typical modern dose of stress. They also thought I seemed healthier (truck stop food be damned).
_Could_ _wild also mean free from stress?_
_Could wild and stress-free be closely related to healthy?_
Little did I know that I was about to jump in and start exploring this notion, feet first.
When I returned home to start my garden, I also began working as an organic farmhand. I spent hours each day growing food within two very different contexts:
On a for-profit farm that desperately needed to maximize the length of their cash flow season
_And_
In my home garden where 'health' was the only god I answered to
On the farm, I began to grow deeply aware that the customer's vision of 'healthy food' and the grower's version of this same dream were light years apart. Because the details were never discussed, both assumed that they were on the same page.
The reason that most growers never seriously entertain changing their approach is a simple case of risk aversion. If paying the bank each month is your first obligation, you simply can't take too many chances with your crops. You can't, as the expression goes, 'bet the farm'. The set of decisions you're enslaved to has nothing to do with growing food for health, no matter which modifiers you bury it beneath; organic, sustainable, green, natural — none of these describe a proactive effort towards increased health.
In my garden, I've learned that the healthiest foods I grow are in fact harvested from plants that are free from all stress. I've only been able to learn this because I was able to experiment and turn my back on common practices. Most of the techniques that home growers rely on have trickled down from larger-scale agriculture and are still tainted with for-profit decision making. Often, these ideas unnecessarily introduce stress to the garden, stresses that don't exist in a wild setting.
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