If You Stop Planning

A poem, a shift from farming to gardening, and thoughtless generosity

If You Stop Planning

I could tell you
we planned it this way
but

it's more honest to say
farming is a series
of failures

to which the only 
answers are 
questions

It's the questions that
grow roots deep enough to 
see us 

through another season
and the impossible horizon 
we try to map

on a calendar, on a grid, in
straight rows of lettuce 
even as volunteers

of calendula and sunflowers
(last year's scattered seeds)
pop up to say

the wind is stronger than
your field maps — if you stop
planning

we could dance together
we could riot in color across
the field!

Flowers at sunset at Good Heart Farmstead

This is the first spring in 13 years we aren’t seeding and planting for 100 families.

The first time in more than a decade we aren’t sprinting into summer CSA season with a to-do list that only ever gets longer.

This year, we are growing food for ourselves.

I walk into the greenhouse to water the greens that Edge planted, and I think, “how cute!” It’s been so long since I had a family garden that I see the short block of spinach and wonder if it could really be enough for three people. Scaling from one acre to two greenhouses (that aren’t yet filled up) is a strange mind warp.

The transition reminds me of college, where I always cooked for 10 - 15 people at a time, never just for myself. Back then, I lived in a house with 10 people and we shared dinner together five nights a week, often with others joining.

When I studied abroad in Derry, Northern Ireland, I was happy to have a shared kitchen in my flat, but in those first weeks most of my flatmates took care of dinner on their own. The first night I cooked for myself, I had no concept of what it took to feed just one person. I had left overs for a week. Eventually, I learned how to scale down, but I also gathered friends for meals and found a happy medium of cooking for four.

Now, though we say we’re growing for our family, we already know there will be overflow to share. I’m buoyed imagining the lettuce and beans and tomatoes we’ll bring down to our town’s community lunch and monthly potluck dinners.

Farming requires calculating the profit per bed foot of each crop and using that as a factor in deciding what to grow. This shift to gardening feels like a shedding of calculations in favor of thoughtless generosity — and when I say thoughtless, I mean less thought of profit and loss, less thought of expenses and scarcity, less thought of basing worth on what we can sell.

Gardening feels somehow less precious and more valuable, a return to what brought me into farming in the first place: the love discovered in soil and roots, how it feels to move along the landscape, to feed people, to feed myself many times over — first on beauty and birdsong, then on music as I chop and saute, and finally on the actual meal, sitting around the table with those I love at the end of the day.

I feel the need to add a caveat here.

I loved farming. I loved feeding our community. I loved sharing the land through food and stories. I often told our CSA customers that they were the heart of Good Heart, and it was true. It is an amazing thing to feed a family for a decade, to watch their children grow and know that the food we grew was part of that.

And yet, things change.

COVID brings a boom when I need a pruning. Climate change brings bigger storms. The balance we want shifts.

I can’t put this transition into three sentences or one essay.

What I want to say, though, is this: the love that brings me to soil and seeds and the cycles of growth persists.

And this year, I’ll dance with the flowers across the field. I’ve always been drawn more to the scattering than straight rows anyway, and it’s time to remember that while I love roots, I do in fact have feet that are meant to move, have been moving me through this transition, and will bring me through the next unfurling.

p.s. If you’re curious what Edge is doing in lieu of farming — he’s shifted from soil to stone! If you’re local and looking for stone walkways, patios, dry stone walls or retaining walls, check out Good Heart Stone.