Can You Dig It?
Goodbye, turkey season. Hello, garden.
Spring turkey season wrapped up last weekend. The last day of the season always leaves me feeling a little sad, like I’m saying goodbye to a dear friend I know I won’t be seeing for a long while. It’s not the turkeys I’ll miss. It’s the woods. I won’t be seeing much of them until deer season. It’s like being stuck in a long-distance romance.
Long-distance relationships are painful because you are far away from the thing that you love. And yes, I realize I can run off into the woods when it isn’t hunting season (and I definitely will), but it’s just different. If you know, you know.
But as the seasons shift, it’s time to switch gears. As the days continue to lengthen and the weather continues to warm, I’ll move my focus from wild, slightly feral pursuits to tamer, more cultivated activities.
It’s gardening season.
And while I will yearn for wild, rugged spaces until September rolls around, I always dive into planting season like it’s a brand-new love affair.
I know I’m not the only person the season infects like some horticultural virus. This time of year, everyone I know seems to be deep in discussions of raised beds and container gardens and debating the virtues of planting seeds versus seedlings.
It might be because I currently have gardening on the brain, but I’ve also noticed an abundance of garden metaphors creeping into conversation. I suspect those metaphors have always been there. Still, it’s like when you buy a white Chevy Colorado, you suddenly notice every white Chevy Colorado on the road and wonder where they all came from because you just weren’t paying attention to them before.
Regardless, I find garden allegories sprouting up everywhere.
Probably because the acts of sowing and reaping in the physical garden have benefited humanity with more than food to fill our bellies. In the garden, we unearth the principles of hard work, discipline, cooperation, delayed gratification, responsibility, and planning. If we allow these values to take root, they can yield fruit in many other areas of our lives.
Gardening helps us focus on what’s important, leading us back to more healthy ways of thinking about the relative value of time and money and helping us weed out the distractions of consumerism. Gardening keeps us grounded (with more than just dirt under our fingernails).
The garden is a microcosm of the natural world, a place to experience the cycles of life and the earth's natural rhythms. Understanding that the end of something is almost always the beginning of something else is tangible in the garden. The end of summer says goodbye to yellow squash and green beans, but hello to cabbage and pumpkins (and deer season!). You move on to the next great thing in life when things change.
If you are a gardener, you understand it is possible to live in the moment, the past, and the future concurrently. The gardener can tend what is there presently, plan for what comes next, all while remembering what came before – what worked and didn’t work.
With so many lessons to be learned from getting your hands dirty, it’s no wonder our language yields such a bounty of agricultural clichés. There is deep wisdom in gardening. Dig around in there long enough, and you’ll unearth so many parallel laws that govern life it will blow your mind. Maybe life is so peppered with garden metaphors because the garden itself is a great metaphor for life.
As poet May Sarton expressed, “A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.” As a model for life that makes sense, the garden is a real and tangible place to start living.
Can you dig it?
Where You Can Find Me This Week
Now that I’m out of the woods, you can probably find me puttering around in the garden. But if you missed my most recent articles for Field & Stream, here they are.
Mothers and Daughters Hunt, Too — Even with female hunters on the rise, it can be rare to see a woman hunting on her own. I’m trying to change that for her girls. Yes, gear reviews and round-ups are fun (and they help me pay the bills), but this type of writing lights me up. I am grateful F&S allowed me to write it and put it out in a highly public sphere.
The 23 Best Graduation Gifts For Outdoor Lovers — Whether they're into hunting, fishing, or camping, any outdoorsy grad will love these gift ideas.
The Best Turkey Blinds of 2024, Tested By Hunting Experts — In case you need one for next year.
Quotes That Made Me Go Hmmm
"The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided."
—Thomas Moore
I've got another two weeks of turkey season between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but given the peculiarities of New England, find my day ends at 1pm. So, on days I hunt, the afternoon shifts to the garden.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say gardening is a microcosm of the natural world. By participating in it, you're forced to pay attention: to the hours of sunlight, the weather, the health of the soil, the pest and pollinators. Sure, you can just stamp blindly through with pre-potted plants and little effort -- but where's the fun in that!?
If it wasn't for the deer and the hail I'd be right out there digging in the dirt!