After a long ride from Gold Beach, through the mountain town of Agness OR, Kayla welcomed me into her Ashland home. With the sun just setting over the hills, she offered me something to drink and a place to sleep out back behind their house, over from the chicken coop near the garden that she would be watering the following morning at 6:30. Her husband Hawkeye was away camping and wouldn’t be returning until later that Sunday, Kayla is quick to mention, and he’ll be able to answer my questions about the garden when he returns.

I had slept in the back yard of Hawkeye and Kayla for two days, nestled between the experimental circular garden plot and the bed of clover, which Kayla offered as a sleeping surface. As I crawled into my bag, a chorus of crickets welcomed the moths, Hawkeye’s favourite nighttime pollinators, joining me in sleep's fast approach.

Traveling amongst the grains and grasses my mind wanders carelessly with the passing breeze. Lavender and carnations and the stars above appear, a quiet confidence in their approach. Night, garden and sky are alive and I lie somewhere in between, tempted to wander with the breeze yet grounded in a place that is of the earth as much as it is of the sun.

“It’s all about the soil”, Hawkeye later tells me.

“People tend to ignore the soil and it’s something that has to be grown just like the vegetables and the flowers”.

This 6 month old garden has the feel of years of hard work. At approximately 40 x 100 feet, every square inch of space is alive and growing. Surrounded on two sides by a fence of suspended squash and cucumber and the occasional Morning Glory, which Hawkeye tells me he grew as much for his wife as for the insects, this Annual Garden is producing for their future. Every vegetable you could imagine, a broad arrangement of flowering plants, herbs, and even grains can be seen from fence to fence.

Hawkeye calls this style of food growing “Annual Gardening” and it fills a gap between the long term Permaculture model and the simple vegetable garden that some of us are accustomed to. Without the tracts of land that can be cultivated into a Permaculture Garden, the idea of an Annual Garden is inviting to those living in an urban setting. With the North American population so completely over burdened in debt, the notion of owning land for most is daunting if not impossible. So in the face of an Oil Crisis, how do we feed ourselves, our families and our neighbours? Hawkeye thinks he has the answer inCo-Creative gardening.

Co-creative gardening as described to me by Hawkeye, is asking the intelligence of the garden and land how each wants to be utilized.

“The intention is to work with the garden as a co-creative partner, relying on the plants to determine what wants to be planted, where they should be planted and how they should be oriented. Plants are conscious beings and have a collective intelligence,” Hawkeye says, and through the practice of Muscle Testing and Applied Kinesiology he’s been able to communicate with the plant kingdom, a skill that he’s been working on for the last 20 years. “Muscle testing is the biological mechanism we have to bridge the language barrier with the non language species”, he states.

Hawkeye’s communication breakthrough came when he was tending a garden in Santa Cruz at the Crepe restaurant. After working with his partner to create a garden space of herbs and roses out back of the restaurant where patrons could dine, the restaurant was sold to new owners who had no intention of maintaining the space, allowing the plants to wither away. Hawkeye was not going to sit idle, allowing his hard work to go to waste. A plan was hatched to remove the plants late one night, liberating them from their certain demise yet something wasn’t sitting well with Hawkeye. Receiving intense waves of thought impressions, Hawkeye sat with the plants and their intentions became clear. The overwhelming message that Hawkeye received that day was that the plants were not as attached to their bodies as we are.

"They loop in and out of the soil just as dolphins jump in and out of the sky. Plants will always send out new runners, release seeds or lie dormant over the winter”.

He was then asked by the plants to be clear of his intentions. When faced with the question of whether he was doing this for himself or for the well being of the plants, the midnight rescue was left behind.

“A garden is about humans finally living in harmony with nature.”

Traditionally there have been two approaches to gardening as Hawkeye sees it.

“Manipulation and coercion. That is where the split is. We’ve inherited the idea that plants are here for us to use and that we can do what we want to them if we give them the right food. We need to be talking to a “who” and not a “what”. For example: there is no such thing in the garden as a pest or a weed. This is cultural baggage. A pest is an insect whose population is out of balance because we are growing a corporate monoculture with chemicals creating an imbalance. We need diversity which in turn solves these issues and balances the insect population”.

When Hawkeye sees an over abundance of an insect, he doesn’t run for the pesticide, he allows the bug to live in the garden over the course of a year, encouraging the bugs predator to show up and do the work for him.

“Although the garden is used to feed humans, it is also a habitat for insects and birds and by providing this space for the creatures, we are demonstrating that we are no longer waging war on the plant and animal kingdom. The plant kingdom is the key to any sustainability equation. They are it.”

I asked Hawkeye what he thinks will mitigate the impact of an Oil Crisis. He responded by suggesting educational programs to teach basic plant craft skills are a first step. He continued on by saying that we need not be running out and buying canned food and generators and candles for the day that the oil dries up, we need to be investing now in seeds and we need to be growing seeds and creating our own personal seed bag. This is the best place to start.

I continued, “But what of those without the land to grow their basic staples?”

He then rephrased my question to say, “How are we going to work out the relationship with the land and who claims to own it to create permanent food systems? It will be the marginal areas, areas outside of the prime chemically blasted farmland, this will be where the growth will occur. Small pockets of land and fields will be worked intensively by the neighbourhoods, by the community”.

I was beginning to sense that there was hope for our human population should an oil crisis occur, that if we banded together and reworked the land to grow our basic staples, that somehow we could weather this storm and move back to a time where community mattered and survival was built on relationships, not on an accumulation of material wealth. That bubble quickly burst when Hawkeye raised the issue of Peak Nitrogen.

Hawkeye feels that a major reason for the massive growth spike in population we’ve experienced over the last 150 years is due to a fairly reliable supply of food, food grown with a petroleum derived Nitrogen. The agriculture industry that supplies this food depends heavily on the introduction of nitrogen into the soil in the form of ammonia fertilizers thus “fixing” the soil, enabling the vegetables to grow. The problem is that this nitrogen is derived from natural gas and if the estimates are correct, the peak of natural gas production is, or has already come and when the gas stops producing, it stops suddenly.

“How is the agricultural industry preparing for that?” I asked.

Hawkeye replies with yet another question. “How are we preparing for that?”

His answer is less than comforting.

“Massive starvation, as there are no mass produced alternatives for the cheap nitrogen we’ve been using from natural gas. The use of nitrogen fixing plants will play a role, as will animals, but not in the amounts that we’ve been used to. Population will inevitably decline.”

The idea of Peak Nitrogen had never occurred to me. I usually float between the Organic/Transitional produce section of the grocery store or Rae Abbott’s front porch Organic Veggie Collective. My produce doesn’t rely on the nitrogen produced by natural gas, or so I thought. I don’t always eat organic, actually when I think about it, including meals with friends or in restaurants, my organic consumption is perhaps around 35% of my total intake, so I guess I do rely quite heavily on conventional non-organic goods. And where do these groceries come from if the natural gas runs out? I wish I had the answer but I don’t and no one seems to.

When I ask, “What will we do then?” the question comes back unanswered.

The sun had set and the crickets began once again with their chorus and I was with friends in the garden in a strange but familiar town and yet I felt like I was not alone. Hawkeye is energetic and his love for the garden, his family, the plants and this earth is remarkable. If I learned only one thing from our conversation it was to be open to new ideas, new ways of doing things. There may come a time when we’ll be needing to look for answers to our pressing issues, answers that may come from the places we’d never thought to look.

David