I need to write about God and death and judgement. Instead I think I might write about gardening. Or not gardening. Non-intervention gardening. I don’t know why I started with God and death and judgement. Actually I do. I was annoyed by some Facebook post about why God is bad. Very bad.

Non-intervention gardening is simple. Go into the garden and see what is there. Watch it grow. That’s it. Let God do the gardening. See how I shoehorned God in. Death now. One of the big problems non-god people have with God is death. Children dying, in particular. Of course other people, God people, find great solace in knowing their dead child is in heaven, or some such super place.

In the garden my little dog finds a mouse’s nest and eats all the baby mice. I seem to have got to judgement. If mummy mouse escapes the dog she will run somewhere and hide. After a while, probably quite a short while, she will find a daddy mouse and start new babies off, and build a nest, or whatever mices do. You won’t see the mouse in church, unless she’s there for other reasons.

Non-intervention gardening is easier to explain than God and death and judgement. But because of judgement, that inescapable human trait, we like some plants and we don’t like others. Sometimes this judgement is useful. We don’t like thistles because they hurt when you sit on them. But then, even though we don’t like nettles because they sting, they make good soup. And I’m drinking nettle tea as I write this.

It’s the soil, stupid! I tell a story, well not really a story, more an anecdote, though it is an anecdote that contains the world, about a teaspoon of soil containing six billion living organisms. According to my story there are as many living little things in a teaspoon of soil as there are humans on the planet. As this is a serious academic paper (wannabe) I thought I had better look it up. In this article http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/secret-life-soil-0 by Peg Herring, quoting Kathy Merrifield I found the evidence. I regret to say that all these years I have been exaggerating. You would actually need six teaspoons to get a world full! In each teaspoon of soil there are one billion bacteria. At this point you actually need to get a teaspoon and go into the garden and fill it with soil. Have you done that? I have. Beside me on the table are a billion bacteria. Not to mention yards of fungal filament, thousands of protozoa, and scores of nematodes. I’m not sure I like the idea of all those nematodes.

The thing is, it’s not comprehend-able. It does my head in!

Absolute irrelevant side comment. A little mouse just came out of the wood pile and paused to check for dogs, then shot across the paving in two or three leaps, to get to the shed.

The soil. It is too mysterious to be digging around in it, so I don’t.

Rule One: no digging. Just think how many baby bacteria you make homeless every time you stick a fork in the ground.

Rule Two: no clearing up of dead plant growth. I have a gang of sparrows out there doing it for me and putting it in the roof, partly for nest making and partly for loft insulation. I need to expand this a little. All the dead plant material contains the essential ingredients for living plants. Why would you throw it away?

Rule Three: this isn’t really a rule, it’s more a solution. The problem with gardeners, or people who have gardens, is that sometimes they want to plant something. God won’t necessarily plant the things you want. There is a whole argument about this that suggests he does, actually, plant just what you need, but I won’t go into that here. Suffice it to say, sometimes the owner of the garden knows best (not). In this case the following operation needs to take place. Get some cardboard. Trample down the plants, grasses, etc in the area where you want to plant your apple tree. Spread the cardboard. Spread a thick layer of organic matter. Thick means thick. Six inches, 150 mm. Then plant through this assemblage. The smaller the new plant, the better, because it means less disturbance of the precious soil. There is a Rule Three B to do with planting seeds. Get the seeds and chuck them about. That’s it.

Rule Four: this is the only other rule. If you don’t like a plant and want to remove it, what do you do? There are really no reasons for removing plants but I do do it sometimes. God seems to think we don’t eat enough blackberries, so he plants them everywhere. But he also made them prickly so we cant’s sit on them comfortably. So I do remove them sometimes, with a spade, chomp, just below the ground. I then put the removed bramble – blackberries are brambles – in a place in the garden where I don’t want to sit. That’s it. Oh, there is one more rule.

Rule Five: this is really covered in Rule Two, and mentioned in Rule Four, but I think it is important enough to have it’s own category -NOTHING ever leaves the garden, apart from the fruit and vegetables and herbs that you eat. Even these should ideally be returned to the garden, once digested, but that is probably a bridge too far, even in this radical gardening world. (I’m writing this article for Kelly and Fin and Raife, and I suggest you have fun interpreting that last sentence.)

And to finish, God and death and judgement. I want a pithy little ending. This is the best I can do. All humans have two things in common, one that we are always wrong, the other that we are always right. And with those two truths in our armoury god and death and judgement can take their place, as my mother would have said, in the grand scheme of things, which is not in the ascendance, but rather three among many, like nematodes and mice and blackberries.

Note: there is a confusion in this article between God and nature. I know, it’s confusing.