Growing with the seasons

This past Friday and Saturday were our final workshops/tours for the year. While there are many people still coming through and spending time here, the end of the workshop year is a key marker of the year for us.

We all have cycles in our lives— from mealtimes, to moon cycles, to ovulation cycles, to the lifecycles of pets, friends, family, ourselves. One of the biggest gifts of growing is leaning into these cycles, and the safety of deeply knowing that everything— good and bad— is fleeting.

I stop workshops this time of year because our vegetable production is ramping up, and I don’t want to miss the moment to intervene when intervention is most needed. So much of growing is just observing and determining the best next action. Our spring births have come, the goats are all born and the milk & cheese season is in full swing, chicks and ducklings are born. If we have too much to focus on, our animals, trees and plants will not get the attention they need and the wave of life can quickly become chaotic.

Seasonality when the seasons are weird

This year, as every year, growing vegetables in Cape Town brings new challenges!

For example, we usually have an easy time starting basil from seed, but not this year. While this may simply be incompetence on my part, I think the failure is shaped at least in part by the fact that we don’t grow in climate controlled, moisture controlled units. We grow in… well… the actual weather. If the weather is cold followed by scorching followed by cold, then the seedlings also experience that. But basil is an important crop for us, both for our household and also because we sell quite a lot of pesto. So not having much growing right now is a problem.

As a second example, we grow two crops of napa cabbage every year, for kimchi. Our second crop is typically more temperamental, and this year is particularly challenging. Given the intersection of seedling age, day length, and warming temperatures, it usually doesn’t work to simply keep planting more. So we have napa cabbage bolting in some areas, eaten by snails in others, and perfectly healthy in another section.

Focus on the journey, but also be creative about obtaining a yield.

In the basil and napa cabbage examples, as in life, we have to somehow differentiate between what is in our control, and what is not.

I cannot magic up the basil that has not grown, but I can… buy in seedlings. In fact, it’ll be a chance to reconnect with a wholesale nursery I haven’t bought from in a couple of years. And that is what I will do this week. At the same time, I’ll keep planting seed to add more data to understand what has gone wrong this spring. Buying in seedlings creates a new cost, but that cost is small relative to the continued momentum of making and selling pesto.

Our bolted napa cabbage is beyond our control, but the snail-damaged cabbage can still be supported and we can get a good yield. We just can’t look away or ignore the problem, as tempting as it is to do so. Even the good cabbage is not automatically good kimchi, and even good kimchi is not automatically satisfying or joyful. We have to make sure we have the time, ingredients, and fridge space to pace ourselves and produce as much as we can. We have to attend to quality and even getting into the rhythm of production, so that the days where Eugene and I spend making kimchi don’t feel like drudgery or stress. The seasonality and cyclical nature of it is complex: it is not only the napa cabbage but the napa cabbage and the cheese and the kombucha and the sharing of time and fridge and pots and more.

These complex, interlocking cycles are what make small-scale production work, especially when seasons are unpredictable.

If you’re a small-scale grower it can be tempting to focus and try to give one thing your full attention: to specialise, in capitalist terms.

But in ecology and in small-scale farming, my experience has been that doing lots of things that intersect can make systems resilient, if the systems actively support one another. The snail-eaten and bolted cabbage leaves help feed the chickens and goats, I’m able to order extra basil seedlings to sell and cover my costs. Our systems always have a way to make use of “waste.”

Natural cycles need margin

In natural cycles, there is no waste, but there is also very little certainty. If you require certainty in terms of timelines, yield, nutrition, it is better to vastly overestimate your needs and have lots of space to be surprised by abundance. We knew, if our basil failed, there was a plan B, C, D, E, and F. And that margin is what allows us to keep growing and keep gaining momentum, even when cycles are unpredictable.

It can be tempting, in a world of malls full of food, to prematurely give up rather than look disease, death and failure head on. Instead, train yourself to keep growing and find whatever route moves you forward! If you can trust yourself to find a solution, you’ll newly appreciate miraculous nature of growth. In our growing, we are changing the way we see the world, see life and death, and changing our response to disease and death, again and again. Here’s to that process, and to growing together.

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