On the Vine
In late summer, squash plants have grown dense enough that thick leaves and prickly vines cover the ground, choking out competing weeds. With luck, that tangle also conceals a gourd, which develops inside a tent of foliage for weeks before I notice it. These pumpkins remind me of ideas that come, as if from nowhere—in the shower, or as I try to fall asleep. The result of the fertilizer—sometimes rich compost, sometimes shit—I feed my brain, such ideas start best when ignored. When I uncover them in an undistracted moment, I am surprised to find they have grown round, with the first blush of color.
Editing is like weeding, pulling from the garden bed, or the page, that which deprives the object nutrients and space. It’s a chore that can be tedious and difficult, but needs to be done for the garden, or the writing, to thrive. This hard, necessary work is often straightforward once I learn to discern a weed, like blooming mallow, from the seedlings I am trying to cultivate. The weeds* grow of their own accord. Getting a plant to grow from seed always feels harder, like there is a magic to it beyond good dirt, water, and sun. Taking an idea and turning it into a complete story also takes a combination of labor and a little extra something. That extra something can be hard to identify. I usually find it outdoors.
I attempt to grow a variety of plants in my garden, a collection of shabby raised beds my husband and I built from old pallets. Our daughter loves to pick cherry tomatoes and carry them around the yard, never eating them. The squirrels busy themselves popping the heads off sunflowers before I can save their seeds. The following spring I will find seedlings in corners where I never planted them. My honeybees forage on the borage I planted with their needs in mind. Five years into keeping a garden, I still feel like a novice, tinkering with different varieties of vegetables and trying to get flowers to bloom in succession throughout the summer.
I can take in stride the greens that fail to spread or the delicate flowers that burn up in the sun, because my real focus, my true love, is winter squash. All summer, I anticipate the autumn morning when I harvest my first Blaze pumpkins, Porcelain Princesses, or Mashed Potato squash, and I spend cold winter evenings procrastinating on my writing projects by scanning seed catalogs for new types to plant. Growing a pumpkin patch requires the most work in spring and summer, but actually takes a whole year.
In Colorado, where it could snow as late as June and the first frost often hits in mid-September, pumpkins need the entire growing season, sometimes more. Some people start plants indoors in March, but my seedlings have never successfully made the transition from the house to the garden. Instead, I plant seeds directly into the ground on Mother’s Day, a date allegedly safe from frost in our subzone, and hope for the best.
After reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, I decided to plant pumpkins with green beans and corn, following the Indigenous tradition of the Three Sisters. I think of corn and beans as hobbies or experiments that I enjoy while the pumpkins are the real goal, nourished by the presence of the other plants. Within two weeks of putting seeds in the ground, a trio of seedlings emerges. Corn looks like a blade of grass. The green bean seedlings pop up with the seed still attached to leaves that open like butterfly wings. The pumpkin plants are short and squat, with two round leaves, and a third uncurling like a ruffle in the middle.
Next, I wait and water. For a month, it looks like nothing will happen. I think about patience during the waiting. I can hardly stand it. Then, once roots have had time to develop underground, visible growth accelerates. The corn shoots up, with green beans climbing the stalks like a trellis. The pumpkin vines start to take over the beds. Blossoms open, attracting native squash bees. Rapidly, the garden expands, its speed derived from all the work that happened unseen.
The complexity of growing winter squash reminds me of the writing process. For weeks, I water the vines, waiting for the first squash blossoms, but the blossoms themselves are not enough. To develop fruit, the pumpkin patch needs both male and female flowers, plus the bees who collect pollen, transferring it from male to female blossoms as they work. Only after about a dozen visits from pollinators can the female squash blossom have enough pollen for the base of the flower to start to thicken and grow a gourd. This process reflects a delicate interplay between plants and insects—soil, water, and sun. As with writing, when a pumpkin fails to develop, it can be hard to pinpoint when the process broke down. The best I can do is keep working and waiting; writing and reading; revising and writing some more.
I keep a writing ritual, returning to my desk for an hour most days. Sometimes, when I start, I have an agenda: revisions to work through or outlines to jot down. On other days, I have no plan for the session. A steady writing routine keeps me coming back to work, even when the ideas do not come easily. I tend to my essays, adjusting transitions, looking for narrative gaps, honing my voice, and, if the work pays off, the writing starts to develop, like a squash blossom appearing on the vine, signaling the potential for a big, fat pumpkin. Some ideas, however, wither and it is best not to keep devoting time and resources to them.
My time in the garden has taught me that patience and persistence mean more than sudden flashes of activity. The weeds seem to spread quickly and of their own volition, but other plants have more specific needs. Pumpkins in particular take a lot of nutrition from the soil. In the autumn, I shovel fertilizer made by our alpacas over the beds, then add a layer of fallen leaves and mulch, held in place by the vines, exhausted from their work feeding squash all summer. As the winter weather breaks down these components, the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium the next summer’s plants will need seep into the dirt below. Even when the garden does not look like it is working, it is. The squash grow from the observable processes of vine and flower, but also from the rest periods.
In her essay “How to Be a Writer,” Rebecca Solnit suggests:
Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work.
She emphasizes that writing happens even when the writer is not actively putting words on the page. When I get stuck on writing, it helps to go outside. I water, harvest zucchini, pull weeds, or just watch the activity of pollinators. Doing something active, allowing my mind a rest from writing while my body moves through the repetitive work of gardening, helps free up that creative energy that can get so bogged down in worry, rejections, line-edits, and self-doubt. I never take it personally when a seed fails to germinate. I just plant a new seed. And with that clarity, I can return to the blank page and write again, hoping ideas grow like vines.
Last year, I planted a type of bean called Scarlet Queen. The beans develop from the bright red flowers that grow on vines climbing neighboring corn stalks. While I observed the squash bees taking a break to nap in blossoms, a sound like squeaky brakes flew past my ears. From the corner of my eye, I could see an iridescent green hummingbird feet away, drinking from the scarlet flowers. The pumpkin patch draws marvels like these tiny, busy creatures, but only from the weeding, watering, and other work that occupies the early summer months. The garden demands these activities, but also the quiet in which plants grow, bees work, and, if I hold my breath and wait, I get to see it all unfold.
In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott insists that writing begets more writing, that the desire to write grows with writing, and that writing is its own reward: “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.” If she is right—and writing, not publication, is the reward for writing—then I would add that gardening, not pumpkins, is the reward for keeping a pumpkin patch.
I grow pumpkins alongside my daily writing practice and the two inform each other. When my ideas fail, observing the garden provides new inspiration, whether from the plants themselves or some curiosity that I encounter while tending to them. And when I worry that the gourds will never grow, the sudden appearance of a swollen ovary at the base of a bright yellow squash blossom, or a ripe orange gourd concealed beneath fuzzy leaves, reminds me that putting in the work might not always yield the expected harvest, but the effort brings the joy of discovery.
*I’d argue sincerely that there’s no such thing as weeds. Bindweed, dandelion, and thistle, for example, serve an important function, feeding moths and bees and keeping soil from eroding. But in the context of my pumpkin patch and my metaphor about writing, they gotta get pulled.
