Now is the time for coddling your soil: mulching garden beds and composting, if you didn’t do this in the autumn. Come late spring, when the flurry of planting that entices you to add just one (or two!) more of everything, you’ll be ever so grateful for some forward thinking to make compost now.
Forward thinking is one thing, but the abundance of the compost heap warms me on a whole different level. Dealing with decaying matter may not at first glance seem alluring—but give it a little consideration and it can take on a new lustre. Aside from its incomparable ability to make a garden flourish, tending your scraps on a brisk winter’s day is terribly invigorating, and is infinitely more rewarding than hearing them be picked up and trucked to landfill to become anaerobic rot and methane. A dash out to the compost and a dose of climate relief in exchange for your kitchen scraps? I’ll take it! Furthermore, the ability to conjure black gold into being feels nothing short of miraculous.
And so it is with gardening in general. To garden is to participate in, and witness first-hand the world at rights, and the kingdom in action. For many of us, some of the first kingdom principles we grasped as children were drawn from garden parables: the pruned branches that bear more fruit (John 15:2); the rocky and thorny vs the good soil (Matthew 13: 1-9); the single seed that dies to produce many seeds (John 12:24). Here are profound themes of transformation and revitalisation through loss, pain, death and dormancy. Indeed, in an everyday way, the garden brings to life these foundational truths. “If a healthy soil is full of death,” writes Wendell Berry, “it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds […]. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long”. There is something inherently redemptive in seeing the spent, damaged and diseased remains of last season being transformed underground into a tangible treasure and source of new life. And all this is never more true than in winter.