Ethics in the Garden

This past week I started digging a vegetable garden. I have always had a desire to live closer to the land and grow some of my own food. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I'd become even more convinced that a backyard garden is not only fun, but also the ethical thing to do. Who would have imagined that cultivating the fruits of the land would result in so much death.

The first victim of the backyard garden project was the lawn. I've never considered lawn grass to be something with intristic value, so I didn't consider digging it out in order to fill the space with yummy veggies to be an ethical quandry. That is, of course, until the grass refused to yield. I jumped on the spade multiple times just to cut through the thick, green carpet of grass. Surely someone had worked hard to lay down and water this seed, to fertilize and tend it. How long had it been growing in this spot to get so thick and to have roots so tied together? As I ripped the sod up from the ground, I wondered if this was truly the most life-giving action.

I was glad to find a good bit of topsoil under the grass, filled with the gardener's best friends -- lots of long, plump earthworms. I greeted each one by name, "Hello, Mr. Earthworm!" so glad for the good work they would be doing for my veggies. Soon, however, I realized that the worms were living close to the surface and as I ripped up the sod, I was ripping up worms along with it. And since I didn't want to throw away good topsoil, I was breaking the soil off the sod with my hoe and managed to hack more than one Mr. Earthworm to death. The question was heavy -- throw away the good dirt or risk the worms? I decided to gently remove the dirt from the grass and threw the living earthworms into the already tilled ground to save them from further aggravation. It was taking a long time, but it seemed a good solution.

Until the robin.

An enterprising young robin red-breast saw what was going on. He didn't see the ethics in play, of course, all he saw were lots of juicy earthworms for the taking. He flew to the tilled patch right next to me and began to fill his (or her) beak with worms. I hoped he would take the dead worms, giving their death a value. But he refused the corpses and only went after worms that wiggled. I began to wonder how many sins this garden would hold.

But as I shooed the bird away I remembered the robin that had made her nest and fed her babies outside my front door a few years ago. I remembered how that story ended with the death of those little birds and I thought maybe, just maybe, I was helping this mama robin feed a nest full of hungry little chicks.

I'm still not sure where my garden falls on the ethical scale. But I do know how much joy I'll have watching the vegetables come into season. As long as the bunnies don't eat them all first.