It’s good not to know exactly where you’re going
Nurturing an unidentified and mini experiment
What I’m about to tell you is a mystery that very slowly divulged its secrets to me — a Halloween story that began around the Fourth of July when I planted (late) some sunflower seeds my father mailed me.
It’s for those of you who’ve gotten so good at planning and purpose, that you’ve lost the thrill that comes from entertaining chance and uncertainty. For you who show up regularly at your work table and are getting it done. Yay! and yet ….
Perhaps a solid routine and clear workplan do not hold the more full and luminous vision you saw what you began your project.
What happened to the excitement of heading into the unknown and moving under the shifting weather of possibility? Did that part of dream move along to make room for a standing desk and ergonomic chair? Not necessarily. I’m happy to report there are ways to make the space for serendipity while still steering your ship.
Let’s return to the west side of my house, where my story begins. That’s where I cleared a strip of dirt along our driveway and planted a dozen sunflower seedlings in early July. I knew I was late to plant them, but just went for it, sprinkling compost from our worm bin and mulch around them.
I watered and weeded for a couple weeks, relieved to see that the sprouts didn’t get eaten by birds. Then, I noticed some new seedlings coming up. They weren’t sunflowers and they didn’t look like weeds. I guessed that they had come with the compost. There was room for everyone, so I didn’t weed them.
By August, the mystery volunteer sprouts had become vines and looked to be some kind of squash. They proliferated and bloomed. I wondered what type of squash I was accidentally growing, hoping the plant would soon announce itself in the form of a budding vegetable.
It did not. While neighbors hauled in their zucchini and summer squash, our driveway vine just sprawled into the driveway and tried to climb the house, curling tiny tentacles around the gas meter and an old cable. I have limited gardening experiences, but I knew that since these were volunteer starts from compost, they might never bear the vegetable they sprouted from.
I decided to stop looking for squash and feeling disappointed. Instead, I’d focus on the pretty yellow blossoms. How nice they were if you just thought of them as flowers, full stop and not a precursor to food. Around Labor Day, there were dozens. We started eating the flowers, filling them with ricotta and garlic, sauteing them, tossing them with pasta.
Meanwhile, my curiosity continued to burn. The unplanned, anonymous thriving vine had become more interesting to me than the handful of other plants I had purposefully planted. I decided to do a little reading. I learned that squash plants have both male and female blossoms, and that sometimes, a vine will produce only male blossoms or that female blossoms don’t appear until weeks later. Only a pollinated female blossom will bear fruit. (This sounds so obvious as I write it, but it’s been a while since brushed up on plant biology!) I examined the two dozen blooms across several vines. All were male.
And then, one smokey day in September, I saw it: a bulge at the base of a bloom. A female flower. I danced into the house to tell everyone. In my reading, I’d learned that some people become busy bodies at this point, rather than leave pollination to the wind and the bees. It sounded simple enough and so, on September 18, I became one of those types. I borrowed a paintbrush from my daughter’s art supplies and embarked on squash husbandry, dabbing pollen from male flowers to the female.
Ten days later during my now daily vine inspection, I saw it emerging: a green ball growing from the base of where a flower had been. Weeks behind the rest of the world, it seemed that I was, finally, growing a squash. A very round, softball-sized zucchini.
My zucchini turned out to be a small green pumpkin. Not long after, it was followed by several mini white pumpkins on nearby vines. All told, the harvest: seven small pumpkins. The smallest one no bigger than a ping pong.
I didn’t grow a Great Pumpkin, and what I did grow was accomplished mostly through chance — and watering. And yet, this was one of the more memorable, fun, and diverting gardening experiences I’ve stumbled into. I learned a bit about the pumpkin — as a plant, not just a porch decoration and I was reminded of the rewards of patience and close observation.
Now back to my original promise, to talk about how to make space in our work for surprises and a little mundane magic. When it came to my accidental pumpkins, I never knew how things were going to develop until the end and that not-knowing made the whole experience better than if it had all gone to plan. It was better both because a) every few weeks, there was a plot twist that kept me interested and b) if I’d tried from the outset to grow several miniature cream- colored pumpkins and one nice middling-sized forest green pumpkin, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.
Sometimes our vision for what the end looks like is beautiful, and if we can get there and match it: that’s amazing! But sometimes the end is so much better because it features things we didn’t have the imagination for at the beginning.
Linus, writing to the Great Pumpkin: “You must get discouraged because more people believe in Santa Claus than you. Well, let’s face it; Santa Claus has had more publicity, but being number two, perhaps you try harder.”
