Unexpected Growth

by James Duquette

One summer morning, I was asked to do a day of farm work.

Now you might think, “But James, don’t you work on a farm?” While that is true, my skills are mostly in writing about things, not in doing them. I have, in general, very little stamina for physical labor of the sort that gardening requires. 

I never liked “yard work”, as we used to call it, as a kid. Typically in my case that would involve bagging, the uncomfortable process of taking all of the plant scraps my dad had cut up off the ground and stuffing them into a giant brown bag to be picked up by county services for compost or disposal or what have you. I always hated bagging.

However, part of my job is being flexible. Legacy puts a vested interest into helping neurodivergent folks like myself to become better suited for the workplace environment, and part of that involves working on our adaptability. 

Watering ~ Photo by Ethan Roe

And so one week, when the farm was relatively shorthanded for a long list of tasks that needed completing, I was therefore asked to help out in the garden rather than spend my day writing and editing as I had originally expected.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I was convinced to spend half an hour watering a fresh garden bed.

I had been told that watering was something of a meditative task. And honestly, it was. I was shown how much water to give each section of the bed (wait until it started to pool), told not to let the long tubing drag across the young plants, and I was set loose with a hose. On a day that was easily eighty-five degrees, it was actually relaxing to watch the water soak and pool over our garden beds. I had that time to myself to focus on the task in a meditative way, to be unburdened by larger thoughts or logistical issues and just focus on the stream and its flow. And it was mesmerizing.

The week after that, I went on vacation. I took a long trip with my family and was away from the garden. At Legacy, the week passed with the apprentices and staff doing normal garden work and once I returned home, I joined them again.

When I had watered the beds, we had recently harvested all of the last blooms for our Spring bundles. We were getting ready for Summer and Fall harvests, and so after clearing the beds, we had filled them with the seeds of a “cover crop” meant for conditioning or returning nutrients to the soil until the next time we needed it. The team had planted buckwheat, and those were the short green seedlings I had been watering in.

Buckwheat cover crop thriving!

I went back to the garden the day after I returned from vacation and found that the buckwheat was easily three feet tall. How? I had just seen it planted a few weeks ago. How did it possibly grow that fast?

That’s the miracle of growing plants. They sneak up on you. They grow when you’re not expecting it. 

People can be like that too. How could I possibly have come from a longtime history of despising yard work to actually enjoying a day of watering plants? 

I guess some growth snuck up on me, growth I hadn’t even recognized. Was I growing like the buckwheat? It was hard to say.

But a few weeks ago my parents asked me to help them with bagging again. When I grudgingly acquiesced to help, I found the process neither so strenuous nor as frustrating as it had been for so many years. I didn’t complain like I always had; I completed the task and felt accomplished. I was more confident and capable than I’d ever been. It seemed some unexpected growth had actually snuck up on me.