CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Real Garden Revolution

The title of this book promised a revolution, and I owe you an honest account of whether there is one.

There is not one in the copper coil. If the evidence in these pages is right, the wire on the stake will change very little about your harvest.

There may be one in powered electroculture, and it would be a quiet one: greenhouses and vertical farms growing vegetables under high-voltage wires or in conductive root mats, using less pesticide, perhaps a fifth more productive, engineered by professionals. That would be a real advance in a world that must feed more people from the same land, and it is being worked on now. It took three hundred years to get this far, largely because each generation forgot what the last had learned. If this book helps a few people remember, it has done some good.

But I have come to think the truer revolution is the one that happens in the gardener.

What actually grows a garden

Whatever electricity turns out to do, the things that are known to work are not in doubt, and they have never been hidden either. Soil rich in organic matter. Compost. Mulch to hold water. The right plant in the right place at the right season. Enough water, given deep and not too often. Rotation, so that pests and diseases do not settle in. Attention: the daily walk through the rows that catches trouble early.

It is striking that the last of these is the very thing that confounds the experiments. The gardener who installs an antenna and then watches that bed closely all summer often does get a better crop. The antenna did not do it. She did.

Proving all things

I began with a verse and will end near it. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” It is a command to test, and it assumes that some things will pass the test and some will not, and that it is our duty to care which is which.

People of faith are sometimes tempted to think that doubt is the enemy. In the garden, at least, it is the reverse. To set up a fair trial, to flip the coin, to weigh the harvest and write down the number even when it disappoints us, is a form of honesty before God about the world He actually made, as opposed to the one we might wish for. Creation does not need our exaggerations. It is remarkable enough as it is: a seed the size of a pinhead that knows how to build a tomato vine out of air, water and light, and that carries inside each of its cells a voltage it has maintained since the first day.

“While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22, ASV).

That promise has held longer than any theory. Plant your garden. Feed your soil. Try the coil if you are curious, with six pots and a coin. And whatever you find, tell the truth about it.