The Homestead Gardener: Growth Mindsets and Garden Success

As the growing season and the calendar year both approach their end, the end -credits rolling on the former some weeks before the latter, I have been gifted some moments of leisure to reflect upon the past year and to begin drafting in my mind some resolutions for the year to come.  Right now, I am thinking about the difference between having a “growth mindset” versus a “fixed mindset.”  

These are concepts made famous by Carol Dweck in her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (one of those books that I know a lot about second-hand, but which I have not actually read).   My son, who attends elementary school, recently brought home some material indicating that he had been introduced to the growth/fixed distinction at school. I am always fascinated by what my son is learning in elementary school these days, compared with what I recall learning at that grade level.  The elementary school curriculum seems far more sophisticated these days than I recall, but it is comforting to see that there is still plenty of room for glue sticks and glitter and crayons (with 120 colors still in the unabridged edition of the Crayola box). 

We did not have much to say in our after-school chat about these two mindsets or why they are worth talking about.  My son seems to appreciate that “growth” means something positive, and “fixed” vaguely connotes a not-so-positive limitation or shortcoming (something like flexibility versus rigidity).  It’s good to get an early start thinking about such things, though of course there are further distinctions that are worth talking about if the topic ever comes up again.  More is not always better, as we all know, and “growth for the sake of growth,” as Edward Abbey famously observed, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.”  We also need to consider different ways of defining “success.”  In spite of these possible misreadings, Dweck’s original point had nothing to do with economic growth or reckless expansion or imperialism.  She was talking about mindsets: our freedom to define our own goals, and to define ourselves, based on our evolving sense of a right and successful and satisfying way to live.

And that brings me back to my end-of-year meditations.  If you are gardener like I am, then you are probably thinking about supply and demand, growth and degrowth, from the practical standpoint of home economics (a subject no longer taught to schoolchildren).  Growing food is easy; the real challenge is preserving it and not being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it.  It is time to take an honest look at that compost pile and take note of the food that got away from you and rotted and went to seed; time to take an honest look at those mason jars filled with uneaten food that are still sitting on the pantry shelves more than a year later.  Yes, a surplus means good news, and we instinctively prefer booms to busts.  But a cornucopia can also be a symbol for waste and decadence.  (What did Carmen Miranda do with that hat full of fruit at the end of the work week?  (I hope it didn’t go straight to landfill; I would imagine a compost pile is not always nearby if you are traveling in show business.)

Two seasons ago, we dabbled in market gardening and scaled up our planting of veggies in order to sell them at a local farmers market. I remember we grew an assortment of salad greens, and every time we came back from market with loads of surplus greens submerged in cool water.  The entire project soon felt like a mistake. We ate a lot of salad greens that year, and I even came to resent the rows and rows of them in staggered plantings.  We were eating greens simply because we did not want them to go to waste.  A good portion of the unsold and uneaten greens that we had grown and harvested became a negligible addition to our compost pile. Nothing went to “waste” as organic matter.  Thinning, harvesting, washing, transporting – that, however, felt like a waste.

Whether growing for the market or growing for ourselves, the winter months are the perfect time to adjust our growth mindset in anticipation of the next growing season.  It is time to think seriously about what was worth the trouble of growing at all this past year; what we want to grow more of next year; what we grew too much of and will want to grow less of next time; and to reflect upon those experiments that were worth trying once, but maybe not again. I have already made my short list based on this past season’s experience:  

•Potatoes:  Bring ‘em on!  I cannot grow too many (though I would like to grow fewer fingerlings and more of the less exotic standbys, like plain old Kennebecs).

•Chiapas Tomatoes:  These are wonderfully prolific and very tasty cherry tomatoes, and they are bred for the tiny finger of children who like candy-sweet snacking tomatoes.  But there are only so many fingers to pick them, and they easily grow in excess of demand.  Next year, one plant at most; replace all the others with good old Amish pastes for canning.

•Zucchini:  Talk about growth for its own sake!  One hill of zucchini is one hill too many.  Must have at least one zucchini plant per year.  Which is one too many.  As usual, table this conundrum for next year’s agenda… (and plant that zucchini come June)

•Celeriac:  It is a slow-growing and sometimes high-maintenance vegetable during the hot weeks of summer, but my family loves celeriac remoulade, and makes a fine soup and mixes well with mashed potatoes, and it is easy to ferment.  We grew enough celeriac to give away to friends who had never tried it before … so we will see how many “thank you” cards we receive before we grow surplus crop next year.

•Watermelon Radish:  This is an aesthetically pleasing veggie, its bright red center with a mesmerizing pattern reminiscent of kiwi fruit.  And it does not have the strong taste of most radishes.  The problem is that its taste does not live up to its visual appeal.  Watermelon radish is on the “maybe” list; we will revisit the question come August of next year, the time to seed it for the Fall.

•Malabar Spinach:  What is not to love?  Malabar spinach has great aesthetic beauty, it is a vining plant that fills out a trellis in a most becoming way, it has lovely flowers, and it thrives in heat and drought when the other neurotic varieties of spinach are bolting and going bitter.  My family loves Saag Paneer, moreover, which requires large quantities of spinach.  What is not to love?  Well, there is something.  Unlike Bloomsdale spinach, Malabar is unavoidably slimy when cooked, the slimy texture of okra.  It took us a few seasons to fully acknowledge the situation. We really wanted to love this plant, but it is time to be honest with ourselves and with our dinner guests and grow this spinach only as an ornamental. Maybe not at all.

Of Pilgrimage and Progress

I love the Amish way of defining a “growth
mindset,” particularly with regard to economic growth and the adoption of new technologies (two closely related questions).  Many of us assume that newer and bigger and faster are better, that Progress and innovation are waves that we must surf upon if we want to succeed in the world.  Those with “fixed mindsets,” those who are unwilling or unable to adapt, are the ones who get left behind.  

The Amish simply do not buy into that thinking.  For them, growth must also be spiritual growth; we are all on a pilgrimage to heaven, all of us in transit on our way to that ultimate form of “success,” and any decisions we make along the way should be evaluated in terms of how those changes in our lives contribute to that long-term process of spiritual growth.  The Amish are truly fearless and independent thinkers — one sign of which is that Amish people seem to be immune to FOMO (“Fear Of Missing Out”).

There is obviously nothing wrong with yearning for new things, and in the Amish ritual known as “rumspringa” young people are encouraged to leave home and explore the world for themselves.  One other manifestation of a growth mindset is to feel that you have outgrown your surroundings: the growth mindset known as “wanderlust.”  As George Bailey says of his home of Bedford Falls: “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet, and I’m gonna’ see the world!”  George Bailey was clearly not in the mood for planting a garden, at least not at that early stage of the movie.  

But if you have a garden and care for lots of animals, you inevitably become rooted to a local place — for good and for bad.  Building soil is a long-term project, and most fruit trees you plant this year will not begin to bear fruit until many seasons have passed.  Here, then, is another interesting thought experiment for the end of the year:  When would be the ideal time to transition away from this long-term project?  When would be the best (worst) time to relocate?   What could we take with us, and what would we have to abandon?  

The answer, of course, is that there is never a good time, and we always have to abandon and sacrifice something.  That is how we measure continuity and rootedness.   

I know of someone who has spent years tending to the same plot of land, patiently building soil and living life according to the rhythm of the seasons, and who must now relocate in the middle of December — in our area, just past the deadline for planting seed garlic and shallots for the following season.  He is now contemplating the thought of living in exile with hundreds of locally adapted seed garlic that he has replanted in the same spot year after year.  He is making arrangements with friends and family to plant them in various plots of ground, so that he can gather the seed together for a reunion planting next October. By that time, though, they will have begun to adapt to their new local conditions.  He plans to leave some seed behind in the old garden bed, to be harvested by the hands of a stranger he may never meet.

Someone else I know recalls a job interview in which he decided on the spot to give an honest and unconventional answer to the question of why he wanted the job:  “Because I love these parts, and I want to settle down and make a compost pile.”  He did get the job, thereby allowing him to put down his roots; and the compost pile he made has now been in continuous business for two decades.  

There is no denying the fact that gardening is an activity meant for those who have settled down. How many times have we heard someone say it, or how often thought it to ourselves: “I simply don’t have time to garden, with my work schedule; and I can’t start a garden until I have settled down somewhere for good.”   Not everyone enjoys the privilege of staying in one place for more than a season, or having full stewardship rights to the land on which they live.  Even fewer of us have the luxury of time outside of work to tend to our gardens and be the good stewards that we want to be.  Homelessness and uprootedness are to some extent matters of degree and states of mind.

And we are all to some extent slaves to someone else’s growth imperative, our goals set by others.  We must go where the jobs are.  Whether we stay home or go off out into the world, we all have to get with the program and at some point, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, we begin thinking about questions of spiritual growth and how that aligns with other metrics for success. The yearning for place and the desire to settle down are also, in their own way, products of a growth mindset.  Perhaps you are reading this column because you have some faith in that possibility of a life in which you can live in a more grounded way, putting down your roots somewhere and making your own compost pile.  My thoughts and hopes are with you.  

Should we think of winter, the end of the calendar year, as a death or a birth? That may sound like a Nativity-themed question.  But it’s actually an old question, regardless of one’s faith or how one celebrates the season.  Most religions have their roots in pagan rituals anyway, and those rituals have always been tied to making symbolic sense of seasonal changes.  Unsubtle Spring lends itself easily to symbolism.  Winter is a harder season to read.  Like most things, I suppose it is whatever we make of it.  The changing seasons meanwhile carry on with their own growth mindset, cycling round and moving ahead, always making something of it.  Time for us to shake off the dust and start planning ahead for next year’s pilgrimage.  

Peace and good will to you, dear readers.  

See you on the path…