Small, Carefully-Tended
Gardening and life wisdom
"A small, carefully-tended garden produces as much or more than a large neglected garden. Beginning vegetable gardeners are advised to start with a small garden spot."
Planning an Idaho Vegetable Garden by Susan M. Bell • W. Michael Colt • Hugh W. Homan • Dale O. Wilson
I ran across this last week while considering what lessons gardening might have for nurturing the creative life. This unexpected (but fun) deep dive was an exercise during an online writing retreat1. It turns out instruction and time-tested gardening wisdom has a lot of instruction and overlaps with the creative life, the spiritual life, and quotidian human life.
Last spring, I bought a garden box kit from Costco. When it was ready for planting, my daughter and I chose a small selection of vegetables for our garden: peas, cantaloupe, cumber, carrots, mint, rosemary, a few strawberries, and one tomato plant. We carefully planted our plants and seeds. My little artist painted rocks for each square to remind us what was growing where. Daily we watered and checked for growth and the first sprouts of carrots. We loved our small garden.
Somewhere along the way, though, perhaps it was a few days when we were away in July, the tomato plant took off. It started growing and growing and growing. Before I knew what had happened, we had a sprawling tomato plant. It wasn't producing any tomatoes, and with shocking aggressiveness, that single tomato plant had taken over the entire garden space. With the tomato takeover, I surrendered, and our garden became a "pollinator garden." The hummingbirds and bees loved the wild area our neglect created. Hummingbirds used the tomato cage as a landing place, so many bees took over the garden as summer waned.
When I finally wrestled the tomato plant down, I found a few carrots, a small handful of overripe tomatoes, a few overgrown cucumbers, and four strawberries. I wonder about the honey our garden produced. I hope it's been the winter food for a wild colony that has sustained and increased our local population of wild bees.
My garden experience is why the words "small, carefully tended" felt like an invitation to consider. I know what happens when a garden (even a small one) isn’t carefully-tended. Each word: small, carefully, tended is an intentional word. The animating energy of each word is thoughtful choices about how to interact.
Small doesn't just happen. It requires curating and thoughtful choices. When we went to the garden store to choose plants for our garden, there were rows and rows of happy little plants and bright seed packets. We had to be intentional about our choices. We had to choose small.
Carefully doesn't just happen. Nothing is accidentally carefully. Careful is care infused with thoughtfulness. Careful is often without the constraint of time. One driving, walking, painting, or writing carefully has chosen to slow down and not rush. It's choosing care over time.
Tended doesn't just happen. Tended is daily engagement to prune, water, notice, and weed. Tending is keeping an eye on, watching, cultivating, and maintaining. One who is tending something, a garden, an illness, or a relationship knows what actions will be best for nurturing the hoped-for growth and healing. Tending is intentional in its very meaning.
The phrase small carefully-tended won't let me go. I know from experience that a small garden can spin out of control when not carefully-tended.
What if I took care that my creative life was small, carefully-tended?
What would my spiritual life look like if I heeded the advice that small, carefully-tended, is an important consideration for growing things?
Exercise, social media, volunteer work, even my closest; there are so many places in life that small, carefully-tended might uncover depth, insight, and ease.
January seems an unlikely time to consider gardening. But, it might be the right time to think about gardening wisdom that says: "A small, carefully-tended garden produces as much or more than a large neglected garden. Beginning vegetable gardeners are advised to start with a small garden spot."
Beginners or not, there is wisdom in narrowing down our choices, activities, and interest and devoting our energy towards careful tending.
A Blessing for Small, Carefully-Tended…
As you pause to survey the garden of your life, may your eyes find the distractions, the overgrowth, and the weeds.
As you kneel to consider how to address what has grown out of control, may you carefully tend and attend to that which does not grow well.
May you see growth and harvest from the necessary pruning, and when you miss the chance, may the overgrowth attract pollinators who redeem what seems to be lost.
When you read "small, carefully tended," what do those words invite you to?
What do you need to begin to carefully-tend in the coming weeks?
We recorded our 30th haiku conversation this past week.
How it works is Michael, Davin and I write haiku poetry. We each choose one haiku to share with the other two. With the three haiku poems (our own and the other two), we write a haibun for each poem. Haibun is a response to a haiku. Our responses are a paragraph or two for each haiku. In this recorded conversation, we read one haiku. The other two read their haibun (response), and the haiku author reads their haibun. We do this for each haiku. We did this for over a year before we started recording our haiku conversations. When you watch, you'll see why it felt important to record them. They are rich and, dare I say it, wise (Michael and Davin’s contributions for sure) beyond measure.
This month we cover dawn and silence. Synchronicity happens in these conversations, which is always exciting.
Visit Profound Living to see our Haiku Card/Bookmarks this month and the entire archive of our past 30 (!!) conversations.
The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer E. Smith
The Unsinkable Greta James is the story of one week on a cruise along the Alaskan coast with Greta and her recently widowed father. Greta is an indie-rock star. Father and daughter have always had a strained relationship, and her rock-star status has not improved the relationship. The cruise was an anniversary trip for her parents, but of course, it is no longer that after her mother died unexpectedly. I really enjoyed the story. It's formatted in a day-by-day way. The complexity of their relationship is felt from the beginning, but the reasons unfold slowly as the cruise heads slowly north.
This was a 4.5-star read for me.
I’m sharing some other advice I learned when I did a bit of a deep dive into gardening in Idaho. As I shared above, the assignment was to consider how gardening wisdom might be transferable into guidance for nurturing and structuring the creative writing life. I’ll share the quotes that spoke to me and a few thoughts about how this might be transferable. All of these gardening quotes are from Planning an Idaho Vegetable Garden by Susan M. Bell • W. Michael Colt • Hugh W. Homan • Dale O. Wilson
Let these words serve as inspiration and guidance for the hobbies, ideas, goals, and dreams in your own life. It feels like gardening wisdom is transferable wisdom.
Site selection The size and location of your garden will often be determined by the area available to you.
What time do I actually have?
What resources do I have?
What is available to me as I begin this project?
Garden Layout: Compared to single rows, wide rows are a more efficient use of space that leaves less area open to weeds.
Group similar projects together so they can cross-pollinate each other.
Wide rows are best for gardening. The gardener can address weeds better; maybe longer periods of time that I can work on a project is better than smaller little chunks.
Intercropping (interplanting) For more efficient use of space, try intercropping. Intercropping is the use of two or three crops in the same area, often combining fast-growing crops with slow-maturing crops for maximum use of space.
What does “intercropping” look like in my creative, writing, spiritual, and quotidian life?
How can “fast-growing” and “Slow-maturing” ideas, projects, etc., work together in my own life?
Companion planting is defined as the interplanting of two or more crops that will benefit from being near each other.
What might benefit from interplanting in my life?
I’ve gained so much from Charlotte’s writing resources and wisdom. Learn more at her website: spiritualdirectionforwriters.com