Growing Season/Harvest Season

 

Last year, I planted twelve different varieties of pumpkin in lightweight grow bags. I started them on the driveway, where the hot concrete could help with germination. Once the leaves unfurled, I toted them all across the yard and set them up on the cattle panel planting tunnel, so the vines could crawl up and over the wire. I tended them through the summer and into the fall: watering, feeding, helping their tendrils find the best grips on the cattle panels. I hand-picked the stink bugs off one-by-one, crushing them between gloved thumb and forefinger, and scraping the eggs from the undersides of the leaves with a linoleum knife. Even so, I wasn't able to harvest a single pumpkin. 

Georgia isn't the ideal growing zone, for starters. It was too hot, and, being planted above ground in containers, and with the vines growing vertically, rather than along the ground where they could root and draw moisture, it became impossible to water them enough. The bugs, manageable at first, multiplied in the thousands and overwhelmed everything. The few pumpkins that began to ripen were besieged by boring caterpillars that killed them from the inside out. It all proved - pun intended - fruitless. 

My fledgling, sometimes sad efforts toward growing food and flowers have highlighted the startling truth of farming: we as consumers take the time and effort of it for granted. For instance, I have ten little Meyer lemons on my lemon tree this year, and it's taken them all summer to ripen - and they're still not ripe. Then think of going into the grocery store and buying ten lemons to heap in a bowl for a kitchen photo shoot. I think of all the deformed and bug-eaten dahlias this year that weren't worth cutting; I think of the entire plants that rotted thanks to a rainy spell and died, tubers and all. And then I think of buying a cheap bouquet at Kroger without a second thought. Months of effort and hard work and back pain, all ephemeral, disposable, and taken for granted. 

Obviously, growing food and flowers is more than worth that effort, whether it's a small patch of garden in your backyard, or a massive lemon grove that provides citrus to millions. Humans need food, need flavor, need beauty, no matter how fleeting. 

Art is a different kind of sustenance, but the soul is no less hungry than the stomach. That's the thought that has powered me through those glum spells when I've wondered, in this age of ghostwriters and AI, if putting a year's worth of effort into a novel is worthwhile. Some days I think yes. Artistically, if my efforts offered a bit of comfort or joy to even one person, then the work was worth it. But there are days when I think it isn't. Does hard work pay off? I don't know. 

But I know that there are seasons for growing, and seasons for harvesting. The harvest is when you learn what you've done right, and how you need to change your routine for the next year's growth. This harvest has made some things very clear, and I suppose that's all we can ask of seasons such as this.