Putting it all to bed
A flashback, a list, a fire, a willingness
2019
We feel the frosted fields extend toward the horizon in the way the light hit, the sun slung low. Not ready to go all the way yet – just enough to light up the hoarfrost on the alehoof in a pattern more intricate than the most expensive china.
It is early November, my last day of work on the farm for the season.
The sun stays in its hot pink sheets and we say: Go before you’re ready.
Today we’re cutting the tomato twine, the structure that held up the plants to grow tall so we could more easily reach their fruits, so we could avail ourselves of the harvest all summer long. Fruit of our labor, the hardest farm job to hammer these stakes into the ground, to hold and tie the twine the length of the row, wearing heavy gloves to keep it from slicing right into your hand’s meat. Pinche hilo.
Now the release has arrived. We walk down the rows hacking through the layers of twine taut between stakes, cutting them down, pulling them through the plants that sag into limp piles now, their last unpicked fruits still bright red, frozen hard as rocks. It feels like a sin to have left them to rot here on the vine, there was more than we could carry. A rabbit is flushed from its hiding place as we proceed, and we – our faces bright with the cold of winter coming – feel part of ourselves too skittering away toward the horizon. Rest is coming, one way or another.
Putting the Garden to Bed, 2023
Time to put the garden to sleep, to thank it for all of the bounty it gave me all season long. I will miss being able to walk out into the yard and pick myself a perfect tomato, or snip off a few okra pods to sauté in with some scrambled eggs anytime I feel snack-y. That season was beautiful and now it is over. Sing the soil a lullaby while you spread mulch offerings over its skin.
I have saved all the seeds I need for next spring: kale, squash, marigolds, etc etc. Saving seeds is not only one of the most soothing tasks of the garden, it also is one of the most empowering. I know that a packet of seeds is only a couple bucks, but it feels really special to me to be able to continuously keep myself stocked with the ability to grow the food that I will eat in the next growing season.
I ascribe to a no-till school of thought around gardens, so what putting the garden to bed looks like for me is chopping down the standing plants that have gone to seed as close to the ground as possible, leaving the roots and the stems (in the case of the okra they are actual stumps because the plants have grown so thick and tall over the course of the growing season). I haul all the plant material into a pile in an unused bed to compost in place over the winter, sometimes chopping it thickly to break down easier, as in the case of the okra plants.
The only exception to this rule this year is the rosemary plant I started in the herb spiral in the spring. Now it is a gorgeous shrub that smells better than anything else in the entire world and it won’t survive the frigid Midwestern winter, so I dug up the entire thing and replanted it in a pot, which now sits in front of a sunny window in the house so I can smell rosemary all winter long. I make a real effort in my life to eat with the seasons (and what I’ve canned or otherwise preserved myself from them) as much as possible, but this indulgence I can’t resist.
This is the time to plant the garlic bed as well. My friend Nick gave me a single head of garlic from his garden in Atlanta as I was moving away in the summer of 2019, and from this single head I now have enough garlic for cooking until the summer, when I will harvest the next crop, as well as enough to plant a full bed for the following year. I have four garden beds and so I rotate every year which bed the garlic is planted into, which is a general good practice for all food crops to keep the soil from wearing out. Planting garlic is one of those gardening things that feels almost like a joke - you just put a whole clove pointy tip up in a shallow hole in the ground before winter and cover it in a bed of mulch. And then in the summer, if all goes according to plan, each clove becomes a fat head of garlic. It feels like magic.
In a normal year I would be planting cover crops in the other three beds, but after all of the drama with the rabbits this spring and the ongoing bindweed infestation I’ve decided I want to try a new tactic and build some tall (about 3 feet high) raised beds for next season. I believe really strongly in not using herbicides in the garden, and in the no-till principle of disturbing the soil as little as possible in order to keep the soil profile intact - this leaves me with hand-pulling as pretty much the only option for combating the bindweed which grows like a carpet to cover all of the plants and, as the LEN song says, steal their sunshine. Real talk: my back is too wrecked for me to keep spending several hours a day bent over weeding. So, the raised beds.
My plan is to lay down a very thick layer of cardboard underneath the raised bed area to try to keep the bindweed at bay for as long as possible (If I believe in nothing else it’s the ability of bindweed to grow everywhere it is not wanted). I’ll also be using the same hügelkultur tactic that I used in creating my herb spiral (I wrote a little how-to about this back in March) and laying down a dense layer of logs, sticks, and leaves from the trees that grow around the house. This is a free way to get the long-term benefits of the moisture-holding and nutrient-releasing decomposing plant matter. After the woody material: soil, compost, mulch, and then they’re ready to plant.
Beyond the garden
…but somehow always still connected to it. There are many ways that I like to honor the change in the seasons. The temperature has been swinging wildly for months but I’m really enjoying chilly mornings curled up in my office chair reading under a quilt. Seasonal transitions are usually difficult for me to adjust to and this year I’m trying to really lean into the death-ness of it all. The secret of the Eleusinian mysteries, as far as we know, was the ritual of psychic death and rebirth. I keep pulling Judgment when I read my tarot cards. I want to attend a dismemberment ritual as the natural world teaches me to be willing to die again and again.
In keeping with the old traditions of just about every culture based in a place with winters, I consider the hearth - the place for fire, the wood stove - to be the center of domestic life until spring.1 To inaugurate the first fire of the season I make offerings of some of the things that had been grown on this land by the power of the sun - the stems and leaves of plants I dehydrated to save for tea, and a hearty sprig of fresh rosemary cut from the aforementioned now-indoor shrub. I make the offerings, as in, I feed them to the fire, which symbolically takes the place of the sun as the center of the world, the warmth-giving entity, for the winter.
I am still somewhat new and tentative about my offering practice but my experiences so far have been so deeply felt and nourishing that I hope to learn a lot more about them and practice more consistently over the course of this dark season. It felt a bit silly to me at first - like I was wasting food, just throwing it into the fire - for what? But over time with the intention of making the offering in the spirit of gratitude for the life-force of the world that fed me all season long it began to feel incredibly powerful and necessary. Josh Schrei talks a lot about how universal the practice of making offerings, or feeding the animistic entities, once was, and now that I’ve started to do it myself I’ve started to see why.
I also really like to make fire cider, a spicy-spicy health tonic, a preventative folk remedy for what ails ya over the cold season. Fire cider usually has apple cider vinegar as the base and then gets infused with ingredients like garlic cloves, hot peppers, lemon peels, spruce tips, rosemary - it’s a very flexible recipe. Julia Skinner has a great primer on how to get started if you’re interested.
What I’m Working On
I’m designing a food forest yard for a friend in Portland with a space that is full of so much potential and several different parts: a sun-dappled front yard with tall trees, raised beds for food production, a sequoia that creates the perfect space for a shade garden full of wild ginger and ferns. It is a lot of fun to work on *and* it is really making me flex my design muscles to connect and make all the different parts cohesive. I can’t wait to see how it comes out!
If you’re interested in learning more about my yard and garden design offerings, just respond to this email and we can talk!
Thanks for reading & see ya next time.
I have been very influenced by Sister Spinster’s Tending the Hearth class, which I took a few years ago.