Give Yourself a Fallow Season

Sometimes the only way to do something is to do nothing.

Fallow.  Like rest, it’s a word no one really wants to admit to.  Its definition, according to Oxford, meaning:

1. (of farmland) plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility as part of a crop rotation or to avoid surplus production.

2. (of a period of time) characterized by inaction; unproductive.

Its synonyms: uncultivated, unplowed, untilled, unsown, unfruitful, unproductive.  

So many un’s – it goes against everything the cultural story of production tells us to achieve.  Which is why even farmers, who know so intimately the cost of not leaving a field fallow, can bristle at the word.

Even small farms like ours – maybe especially farms like ours, 1.5 acres growing first for 20, then 40, then 80, 100 CSA members for the past 10 years – live under the push of intensive plantings, maximizing yield, calculating profit per every 100 feet.

It’s exhausting.  

The last summer before we started Good Heart, I grew a flower and herb garden in a highly inefficient pattern.  It looked like a maze, something you might find in an English garden, except I sowed crimson clover in the pathways, which unlike white clover isn’t low-growing, and by mid-summer the pathways were a knee-high river of red blooms.  This garden was slow to harvest from.  Slow to move around.  Because of the clover, very few weeds took hold, and so you could say it was uncultivated, in that I hardly weeded at all.  But oh, the gorgeous unkempt explosion of color that garden was.  

I loved it.

And when the frost came, the crimson clover laid down alongside the chamomile and snapdragons and bee balm.  The cover crop already incorporated and ready to tuck in the soil for a fallow winter season.

It’s been 12 years since that garden.  12 years since I allowed myself the inefficient play of blooms that do not have to yield a certain dollar amount.  

Because where is the time for rest?  

That’s what I asked myself over and over, as I pushed myself to create, to grow, to show that harvests could actually be continual.  

Even as external pressures – social media, the pandemic, shifts in our business, parenting, trying to do it all all the time – ground me into burnout.

Even as everything inside me – as in, my heart – whispered rest rest rest.  

I felt split in two: the deeper layers rooted to the wisdom of fallow time, and the public-facing me beholden to productivity.  Which is a long way to say:

I finally gave myself a fallow year.

I stopped writing weekly blogs on my website.

Stopped sending weekly newsletters.

Stopped posting on Instagram (insta: the antithesis of fallow time)

I even stopped farming.

I was, in these areas of my life, unproductive.

This is the trick of lying fallow.

Like fallow land, where mycelium runs through soil creating new pathways that build resilience, fallow time allows for processing, perspective, and healing.  And there is no sustainable productivity without those things.  Which is to say, productivity itself is cyclical.

Sometimes the only way to do something is to do nothing.  

Sometimes nothing has to be done for a very long while.

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Now, I’m learning again how to move in the seasonal rhythm that I set out to live more than a decade ago.  To give myself rest not just when I need it, but when I want it.  To move a little slower and notice so much more.  

As we inch closer to the Winter Solstice, this is my invitation to you: 

Let yourself lie fallow.

Who knows what will sprout up from the rested, replenished soil of your soul.