Give It a Rest

I forwent my vegetable garden this year. After years of cultivating in the same spot, I had to give it up because blight had ruined my tomatoes for the last few years and last season it hit my potatoes, too. Although I have been very cautious about rotating crops and not using blighted plants in my compost, I spent five years planting too much in a small area and I asked too much of the soil without allowing it time and space to replenish itself. This spring, it became apparent that my garden needed a rest.

It is strange not to spend hours every week maintaining a veggie garden; it seems a bit like abandonment. But I planted crop cover and flowers in the garden space and in the fall I will plant a winter rye to help bring the soil back to health. I feel confident that I will be able to return to it and that it will be as productive as it was for those first few years.

Sometimes it is necessary to step away from a cherished project to make it stronger. Nurturing plants and nurturing words are similar in my mind, as I have said before, and sometimes a piece of writing becomes so overworked that a writer must put it down. Time and space can give writers perspective in a way that no act of revision can.

I recently worked with an author who had been writing and revising his manuscript for four years and, when I mentioned that I couldn’t picture his main characters, he was shocked. He said that they were so clear in his mind that he didn’t even realize he had not described their physical characteristics in words. He admitted he was too close to the story to recognize its flaws.

While it is important to write daily, shifting focus to a different story or even writing in a new genre can be refreshing. Words are the seeds of stories and a writer must respect them, but the soil still needs to be healthy to support the complete story. Let it rest when it needs it.

The best surprise of letting go of my vegetable garden this year has been that I have enchanting flowers. And then there are the butterflies. I missed these beautiful gifts when I had a large part of my yard dedicated to vegetables. This time of rest has produced pleasures that are different from food, but they still bring me joy and instead feed my imagination. My garden has gone from being a work of drama to magical realism. I cherish what it is now, but I still expect to return it to its original purpose.

If you have been working on the same project for a long time and are too focused on cultivating a story, it may be time to put it aside. When you return to your original piece, it will be all the better. And you never know, maybe you will produce something unanticipated and even more lovely in the interim.