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.
