Summer Harvest

 

My garden is bursting at the seams. I have been up to my eyes in cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula, pumpkin, peppers, eggplant—the list goes on! I try and dump produce on any soul who stops by the house, but it isn’t enough.

Mind you, this is my first garden, so the whole thing has been an experiment. My thoughts were, “is this shit even gonna grow?”—way back in April when I plunged my hands in the soggy manure-laden soil.

The gardening process has been a labor of love. In the beginning, I weeded every other day and took time to examine each plant in their fragile nascence. If the temperature dropped below 60, I quickly rushed home to cover the boxes. At my first harvest—mostly strawberries and spring greens—I was twitterpated. There’s nothing quite like eating a meal you have grown yourself. The food tastes so fresh! It’s almost as if you can feel the life force you are consuming. You realize how ‘dead’ grocery store produce really is; it’s no wonder when majority of our grocery fruits and veggies travel all the way from equatorial zones so we can be supplied with any and every lifeform we desire 12 months out of the year—its fucked.

In the modern world, we have become desensitized to many natural forces. We have let our seasonal compass rust and in that we have lost a sweet patience and connection to our food that is cultivated alongside the seedlings. There is no greater feeling than waiting for your berries to ripen or the tomatoes to redden, and then gorging for a few weeks at t time. Blackberry-flavored everything and bruschetta for daaaaayze.

Of course, it’s not always flower-children and Indian summer picnics. Nature is a reflection of our own internal seasonal energy—something I have never listened to before but is ripe with lessons. Leading up unto the summer solstice, we are all growing--planning, planting, watering, waiting for the sun to shine and our explosion of energy to begin. I certainly felt this way—manic almost, like I had a fire under my ass and I needed to do everything. In that time, I moved to a new city, got two jobs, a new house full of new roommates, and began training for a marathon—just for shits and giggles. This is spring and early summer energy at its finest.

Now that summer is waning, we’re all exhausted. The plants are dumping their energy into their fruits in a way of sluffing off that long-cultivated energy. Like, ‘here take it all, I’m done.’ We can recognize that same urge ourselves— ‘yeah, I’m ready to layer up for fall and tuck away my SPF.’

We’re over it. A tell-tale sign is the overgrowth that we see happening. At least with me, I went from over-mothering my garden to straight-up negligence. I was like, ‘come one come all—grow however you want.’ And now my garden is a disheveled forest of wiry, too-tall, indistinguishable specimens.

The waning of summer brings an insightful lesson of how things can “grow-over” in life. If you don’t take the time to prune the thoughts, actions, and behaviors that inhibit your full potential—things get overwhelming. We can’t distinguish one root from the next—good and bad.

There’s a difference between maximum growth and maximization of the plant’s properties. Lettuce, for example, if you don’t trim consistently will put all its energy into growing a super high stalk, and give tiny, bitter leaves. Similarly in my life, when I put all my energy into ‘reaching for the sky’, doing everything I possibly can to stay productive, even if it means working 7 days a week—my harvest is a fraction of the quality that it could be. Even though it’s tempting to shoot up as fast as we can, we must take the time to grow-slow, trim unnecessary influences and have faith that seasons cycle.