The Bramble Menagerie

January is not a big month for gardening in most temperate climates. If you’re me, January is a big month for sitting on the sofa, drinking tea, and eating more potato chips than you’d care to admit in a public forum. This is true winter, deep into the season of the Crone, when the garden is supposed to be at rest, tucked under a thick, cozy bed of mulch. Avid gardeners must content themselves with cataloguing their seed stores, making lists of seed orders, supplementing their supplies, mending tools, and plotting and scheming for the coming growing season.

Here in the Pacific northwest, the onslaught of gray skies and pervasive precipitation in the colder months drives everyone indoors. Those of us on the west side of the Cascade mountains don’t get much snow, just rain, rain, rain. We get enough rain that inevitably at some point I start thinking seriously about how useful one of those hideous amphibious cars would be for commuting – who cares if it makes your retinas bleed to look at it if you don’t have to worry about whether the road is flooded out? Best case scenario, its hideousness would just encourage people to get off the highway or pull over and stare in confusion as they try to sort out what kind of crime against humanity/new Tesla truck monstrosity this is. They can eat my muddy tire spray as I hydroplane gleefully toward home. Suffice to say, we get a decent amount of rain here in the winter.

This year, I’ve really struggled with making peace with the season of dreary weather and short, chilly days. Winter is a needed time of rest and hibernation in the natural world, and I know I’m supposed to be embracing the turn of the seasons, reflecting on the past year, recuperating, and letting go of habits that don’t serve me anymore. But, I’ve struggled to look at this cold season as anything but the onset of darkness and austerity. It doesn’t help that the news is, as always, a complete bummer, and we’ve had a handful of worrisome events closer to home, like my husband getting laid off and some illness in the family. This is normal life stuff, but it feels like the hailstorm of bad news has persisted in spite of our best efforts. Maybe we haven’t eaten enough potato chips (this is a hypothesis I’m willing to test). For whatever reason, things have just felt grim.

A perfectly organized gardener would have put their garden to bed at the end of the fall harvest, after the first frost. For us, this coincided with the first of a few challenges that put the garden on the backburner (I’m going to be honest – considering the Olympic level BS we’ve been fielding the past couple months, if not for the self-watering convenience of the wet winter weather we get around here, the garden wouldn’t have wound up on the back burner – it would have wound up in that narrow crack between the oven and the cabinetry that we forget about until that one judgey relative invites themselves over and, as we rage clean, we discover where all of the oily, sticky food crumbs wind up tucked in with the dust bunnies).

If we’re going to be ready to replant the garden this spring, we need to clean things up, get everything mulched, and put down compost by the end of February. Thankfully, unlike that judgmental relative, the garden is pretty forgiving, and we’ve got some time to catch up. Even in winter – a season characterized by lack – the garden reminds me to change my perspective. That’s the magic of the garden. Gardening is an act of love and service – love and service to the plants you’re caring for, and love and service to yourself, your family, and your friends who will be nourished by the beautiful produce you’ve grown. Was it Michael Pollan who wrote that gardening is an act of optimism? It’s an act of hopefulness, an investment in the future. Today might be difficult, but I’ll water my mustard greens anyway, trusting that doing so will result in edible produce for my family. Meanwhile, the garden grows in good faith that there will continue to be water, sunlight, and good soil. Nobody can be a cynical gardener, nor can a gardener be petrified by anxiety or uncertainty. The garden requires you to get up and do something, even if it’s only making sure the plants get watered, on the days when facing the Future with a capital “F” feels impossible.

Your reward is a tomato or a bunch of greens or a handful of snap peas that haven’t ever touched the mass industrial agriculture system or supermarket shelves. (Clearly, this becomes valuable to you about the same age that socks become an exciting birthday present. Let the record show that at this point my husband Kyle exclaimed, with enthusiasm, YEAH, I LOVE SOCKS!). The point is, you earned those greens with good faith and the sweat of your own brow. You didn’t let the abyss win. This produce doesn’t need to be misted with pretend rain and bathed in a special LED spectrum to appear fresh– up here we’ve got plenty of real rain to go around, and it doesn’t get much fresher than picked straight off the vine. Societally, we like to think we’ve come far from our wild, cave-dwelling origins, but there is something deeply satisfying about harvesting real food that you’ve cultivated with your own hands to feed your loved ones. It’s so simple and so important.

So, even in the grips of winter, the garden reminds us to keep looking up. I come from simple stock – my great grandfather was a Welsh coal miner, and my grandfather a logger. My grandmother canned jam well into her eighties. My people are well-grounded with their roots in the earth. But even for me, it’s easy to forget how fundamental this is. I suppose they call it ‘groundwork’ for a reason. At this point, we could talk about using kitchen scraps and manure to make compost, and I could make a metaphor about the magic of the garden turning literal trash into treasure (this is if your idea of treasure is more zucchinis than one can feasibly dispose of using legal means, without resorting to secrecy, deception, and outright fraud. There’s magic in that, too – in the ability of future you to victimize/surprise your neighbors and/or coworkers with unsolicited zucchinis). Nobody can focus on being down if they’re busy saving their family from being drowned in zucchinis, right?

For me, the garden is a practical necessity to provide healthy produce, but it is also a practice of mindfulness, devotion, and gratitude. I suppose they call it groundwork for a reason. It helps me focus on the things that really matter – the beauty of growing things, of being outdoors, and of caring for your loved ones. It requires me to get off the sofa and remember that even in this season of quietude, the garden feeds us – literally and metaphorically. And that is something worth celebrating with joy and gratitude year-round.