Aspiring to More Than Results

“Do not depend on the hope of results…[Y]ou may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”——Thomas Merton

We have been answering this still-somewhat baffling call to the land for seven years now.  We have become well-acquainted with a handful of preferred seed purveyors, and increasingly familiar with particular varietals of vegetables. We have become attuned to the pitch pipe of the seasons, bending our schedules and timing our tasks to harmonize with the seasons and their particular needs and opportunities.  Garlic, we have learned, goes in the ground in October and is harvested in July, a few weeks after we have harvested the scapes from the hardnecks (all terms that were meaningless to me just a few short years ago) once we see the foliage yellow and die back.  Fruit trees are pruned in late winter, just before we start the early seeds in the greenhouse.  I’ve learned that we live in growing zone 5 and the relevance of average last and first freeze dates.  I’m still internalizing maturity patterns of the myriad vegetables we plant — a task that would be made routine if I would simply take the time to note on my calendar the growing days commonly referenced on seed packets — but my internal calendar is gradually finding a general calibration.

We are, to put a point on it all, getting better at it.  Our objective in moving to this expanse of soil with a shovel in hand was to learn how to grow food on simpler terms than those employed by the larger, now conventional food system that I deem to be unsustainable.  And we are learning.  Along the way we have necessarily expanded our course of study to include soil microbial activity and organic matter content, pollinator attraction and habitat, naturally beneficial eco-system development and enhancement, climate fluctuations, and more.  We have grown familiar with the reproductive patterns of deer and rabbits; the predatory hours of raccoons and possums; the sunlight requirements for laying hens and the value of the preserving “bloom” that naturally coats a freshly laid egg.  We have observed how rainfall moves on our land, prevailing wind patterns, and the value of “edge zones.”  And we have experienced the joy — and the burdensome responsibility — of harvest.  After all, having invested time, energy and months of attention we want nothing to go to waste.  And our freezers are full — the plural-denoting “s” on that noun being intentional.  We have lots to smile about, and happily and routinely do.

All that being said, we are no stranger to the grocery store.  And it can be depressing.  Passing through the produce department, mentally comparing the softball-size bell peppers, the foot long carrots, the shoe-size potatoes, the spotless apples with my punier, more blemished counterparts, it’s hard to feel like a success.  Our results feel…paltry.

And then I remind myself that there is more involved than our inexperience.  We have consciously chosen to use older, typically heirloom seeds rather than the modern, proprietary hybridized varieties.  We have eschewed herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that function like steroids in athletes — all choices that we fully realize mean harder work, smaller and fewer and less beautiful expressions.

Why, then?

I suppose it's because we have come to believe it to be important.  Something deep down has persuaded us, along with Merton, that some things are more important than results. I know that sounds heretical in 21st century America, where “bigger, faster, cheaper, more” is our real national anthem.  But despite the drumbeating mantra of the marketing forces at play, we have learned the hard way that “new and improved” are not synonyms.  While there are certainly and blessedly beneficial innovations, today’s breakthrough solutions have a nasty way of turning into tomorrow’s intractable problems.  We have developed an aversion to the idea of eating food that has been bathed in toxic sprays; a bias for vegetables that have been selected for flavor rather than appearance and durability for long-distance shipping; and a principled preference for open-pollinated seeds over patent-protected hybrids, believing that something as fundamental as fruits and vegetables should be the common “intellectual property” of us all.

I suspect I’ll always feel some measure of “pepper envy” while passing through the produce aisles of the grocery store, admiring the size and the visual perfection.  But I wouldn’t trade our smaller, gnarlier harvest from our own garden.  Fresher, healthier and tastier, it ultimately digests as something yet more:  our own determination to concentrate, as Merton implored, less on the results, and “more and more...on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

And that tastes pretty darn good.

Lessons From A Different Way of Knowing

We drop a seed into the ground,
A tiny, shapeless thing, shrivelled and dry,
And, in the fulness of its time, is seen
A form of peerless beauty, robed and crowned
Beyond the pride of any earthly queen,
Instinct with loveliness, and sweet and rare,
The perfect emblem of its Maker's care.
——-John Oxenham

Time, I have always known, is constantly moving.  I once knew this primarily on the surface of my skin by winter’s cold and summer’s heat, and by the shifting wardrobe that responded to those changes.  I knew it, too, I suppose by the eruption of color in spring and the turning of leaves in autumn.  But the farmstead teaches a different way of knowing — a slower, more careful reading.  I know, for example, that summer is incrementally ebbing because I now close and secure the chicken coops at night a full 45-minutes earlier than I did a scant few weeks ago, and release the hens a full 30-minutes later in the morning.  I know it because, though weeding remains an unfinished claim in the garden, the more clamorous demand is harvest — the eager, jumping up and down, hand-waiving attention-claiming of reddening tomatoes, blimping zucchinis and stretching okras begging to be picked.   Which confirms a deeper lesson than the mere change of season.

Gratification delayed is not gratification denied.

As the poet reminds me in those scraps of verse at the top, what now seems like eons ago we carefully, methodically dropped those tiny seeds — “shriveled and dry” — not literally in the ground but into carefully prepared soil blocks and nestled them in the greenhouse.  There, warmed and protected from the lingering winter and consistently sprinkled with stored rain water, they swelled and stirred and sprouted.  Eventually we transplanted the seedlings into the garden where they continued to grow.  And now...

“in the fulness of its time, is seen
A form of peerless beauty, robed and crowned
Beyond the pride of any earthly queen...”

In the fullness of its time.
When it is ripe.
When that gratification can finally be indulged.
Today, because yesterday was too soon and tomorrow will be too late.


And the truth is that it wasn’t that long after all.

I’ve come to value these twin knowings — both the incremental tick and the broader sweep of time — that at once grounds me in the pregnant nuance of the moment and orients me with the season’s larger perspective.

Time is, indeed, moving.  The days are getting shorter, which feels like foreboding loss.  Meanwhile the garden, shouldering responsibility for what Parker Palmer describes as “the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring,” is paying off its debts.  Lugging into the kitchen the heavy harvest crates, wondering what we will possibly do with all this bounty, it is indeed hard to remember, as Palmer confesses, “that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life.”

Rooted, then, in this different — closer — way of knowing, I step into this day to harvest whatever may be ripe, and to use fully and productively, with the chickens, however much daylight it offers; trusting, as they have taught me, that there is always, somewhere, a patch of shade in the heat of the afternoon.