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.