Dirty Wine: Messiness Is Next To Godliness

There was a sign in our kitchen when I was a kid that read:

“Our home is clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to be happy.”

I always loved that message, and still do. It spoke of a rejection of a neurotic attempt to live in a sterile environment. It spoke of sanity, warmth, and hardiness. It announced a tolerance for the messiness of real life.

As we have converted our South Los Angeles home into a permaculture food & wine garden, we’ve become the house on our street with the “messy” yard.

This mess has a purpose.

None of our neighbors have said anything yet, directly, but it could just be a matter of time.

Why are we, as a culture, so averse to mess?

My amateur psychologist take on the mentality that prefers perfectly manicured lawns, edged tree wells, bordered gardens, and evergreen foliage is this:

We are afraid of death.

Neatness can be a form of controlling the uncontrollable. We crave control, or the illusion of control, because we want to believe there is something we can do to stave off the end of ourselves.

Leaf litters, mulches, composts, brown and withering plants… these are the stuff of the fungal side of life, the dark underground side. They are all harbingers of life-enriching death.

And so we associate negative judgements with a messy looking yard. The owners must be lazy, lacking in moral uprightness. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all.

Those were the same judgements made of the native peoples in the Americas when European colonizers first arrived.

I’m reading a great book titled Tending The Wild, by M. Kat Anderson, about how the “wild” landscape of California – the lush abundance of which was marveled at by every European who came here – was actually a cooperatively managed ecosystem by the people who had lived here for the previous 10,000 years. There was deep understanding and intention to the mess.*

Well, read the headlines about California today. We certainly cleaned it up.

But back to our little slice of unkempt Los Angeles...

Are we lazy? Sure, at times, I guess you could say that. Between managing a wine business and having two full-time unrelated jobs, yeah, we tend to see how little extra work we can get away with.

I prefer the term “efficient” to lazy. We let nature do the work that it evolved to do, rather than try to clumsily and wastefully replicate its energies at soil and ecosystem building.

We don’t believe in keeping nature in its place, outside our city.

We don’t allow gardeners with leaf blowers – which are illegal in LA but still used every day – to scour our “yard” of every scrap of plant litter. We let leaves and flower petals fall to the earth and stay there, decomposing, creating richer soil.

We don’t pull up and discard every seasonal flower or plant. We let them go to seed and die and fall back to the earth. If we pull them up we do it to lay them back down somewhere else in the yard as a mulch that will produce flowers or vegetables in the spring.

There are no such things as weeds in our yard.** Thistles, with their long tap roots, help break up our heavy clay soil. We try to cut them off at the ground before they go to seed, and they become mulch and tillage.

We’ve come to love how knotweed is the first plant to colonize any bare soil in the yard. It creates a perfect ground cover - only an inch or two deep – that prevents erosion and keeps the soil cool so that other food plants can flourish. So far we haven’t noticed any competitive disadvantage for our food crops. We now let knotweed go to seed. We are actually cultivating it, passively.

When I pull leaves or laterals or hedge the vines in our vineyard, I drop them to the ground to help enrich the vineyard soil. When we prune vines or trees, we chip the branches and put them under our trees and vines as mulch.

Our garden soil is so rich at this point that vegetables spill out of the boxes and literally fill the back yard. We don’t try to contain them. It’s hard to walk out the backdoor to feed the chickens at this time of year. You have to pick a meandering path through a jungle of squash & grape vines and tomato plants and runner beans. It’s hard to turn over a leaf without finding lady bugs, or monarch or swallowtail caterpillars, or some other beautiful, diverse, and beneficial life form.

Swallowtail caterpillar on fennel flower.

There is intention to every of the dozens of species of plants that we cultivate – or allow nature to cultivate – on our little lot.

To see that intention, nature asks us to look at the world in a different way than is the current cultural norm. Because the mess is in us – in our ignorance of and disconnection from natures processes, and in our fear of them.

But a messy vineyard can make a more delicious wine, if it’s the right kind of mess. Just as our home can be a place of happiness, if it’s the right kind of dirty.

* The fetishized idea of wilderness as a place absent humans or human intervention - places set aside into parks and preserves - is a misconception based on a Western dichotomy between nature and human. If you see humans - if you see yourself - as part of and inextricable from nature, as the original peoples of California did, then the idea of wilderness is nonsense. All nature is our home and all living things are family, to be respected and cared for as such. When the wild is everywhere, civilization is seen as a process of burning down our own home and not having a back-up plan of where we will live.

**The one exception is the Bermuda grass that had been planted long ago as a lawn on our lot. It’s a real pain in the ass, and we try to eradicate it with extreme prejudice. We are begrudgingly impressed by its stubborn resilience, though. It will not die. It is the tester of our determination and commitment.