The Abundant Harvest Newsletter, Fall 2019
The first full growing season of the Abundant Harvest is nearly complete and a lot has happened since it’s beginning. Perhaps the mark of a new growing season is the first planting, which for me was several rows of potatoes in the middle of March. Then came garlic (which was almost a total failure), onions, lettuce (which again was a failure—poor germination rates due to old seeds), peas, and then the rest. Sometime close to the potato planting I was told I needed to leave living in the shed—alas. The cold had nearly beat me anyways, living there throughout the winter with essentially no heat, but I was still sad to go. The news came and I walked to my side door and sat down in my snow pants as the sun shined through the barren trees above the neighbors’ roofs and radiated my face. Change was in the seasons.
I moved in with dear friends, Ron and Judy Zook, in Lancaster city, which turned out to be a welcome change. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned after living in the shed alone for six months was that I need to live with other people: I need to bump into housemates unexpectedly in the hallways; I need to cook with others spontaneously; I need people to tell about my day and to hide from. I need community. I quickly got a new job at a restaurant in town, The Bread Pedaler, as commuting to New Holland every day or so to work quickly became inviable. I also started connecting more with different social justice groups in the city, like The Catholic Worker House, Lancaster Stands Up, The Sunrise Movement, etc. Many friends were also closer. I left my cell to enter the world at the beckon of responsibility, and I think I was better for it.
The garden continued regardless. For the first few weeks of the growing season I mostly prepared the beds and planted. I didn’t do any tilling, which was planned as part of a strategy to preserve soil integrity and microbial life. The season before I planted a cover crop on much of the property and laid straw on the rest. The cover crop died and the straw compressed and both pulled back from the beds like a blanket, revealing the nearly weedless surface below. Seeds were planted and watered, soil hoed and time passed, and a harvest soon came. Food distribution to the neighborhood started again and before long increased and increased and increased. One person told me that I should be ashamed because I didn’t keep record of how much I received. Maybe. I told them that I wasn’t selling it or making money so I wasn’t so concerned about keeping an accurate count. There was an abundance.
As the harvest gradually increased from the end of spring into the early summer the distribution days did too. Accurate records of who I visited when and what I left with them did become an issue so I decided to organize a routine route. Also knowing how much to harvest became a problem, not wanting to end up with highly perishable produce not given away by the time I needed to catch the bus back into the city. I decided to ask some people who I knew appreciated the food deliveries if I could visit them at a certain time each week and if they were not home to leave a grocery bag by their door. Essentially, the project evolved into a kind of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), where each week 20-30 shares of fresh, organic produce was delivered to folks in the neighborhood—all for free, a gift. I would load up five five-gallon buckets full of vegetables on my wheelbarrow and push it down the sidewalks, delivering to one side of the neighborhood at the beginning of the week and to the other towards the week’s end. Even until October this has remained the weekly rhythm.
Now looking back at the end of the season, I wonder how to measure success. Yes, the garden grew a lot of vegetables (without accurate records), people were fed, friends were made. These are surely some measure of success. Surely there is much that cannot be measured. How does one quantify love? So much cannot be translated into calculations or costs, and that is the point of the whole project: to encounter a world beyond the limitations that bind us and to begin living in it now. Certainly I have learned so much about the gift in this experiment with truth. Even today someone new I met said after giving them a grocery bag of produce and telling them that it was free, “I’ll pay it forward,” which is what I usually say to people to help explain what I am doing and here I didn’t even have to because of intuition! At the heart of the gift is the interconnectedness of all things: what we do for one effects the rest and everybody knows it. Further, the good that we receive is never limited to just ourselves but extends to all of creation and “paying it forward” is just the necessary manifestation of a spiritual truth that always precedes it.
At the beginning of the Abundant Harvest almost a year and a half ago I decided that a full growing season was a necessary amount of time to have a true test of the hypotheses behind the experiment. The time has passed and the results are in. Perhaps I do not know the conclusion fully in my head but certainly they are in my heart. At this point, I do not know what the future holds next year for the Abundant Harvest. The opportunity to tend the garden for another season is very much a possibility, as I understand it, but I wonder what is the best use of my time and talents: where is God calling me? On the one hand, I could very well see myself pursuing another year with the project, but I also lament living so far away from it and having my life somewhat divided as a result. I desire that my work-life and home-life be one, intrinsically intertwined, that my life be a whole, like a plant firmly rooted in the ground. I will be spending most of the winter in a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, California, called the New Camaldolese Hermitage, to learn from the monks there more about prayer and community, leaving here Nov. 12 and returning sometime in March, and my life afterwards is still to be determined. Do keep me in your prayers.
I would be remiss not to thank and identify the many people who have made the Abundant Harvest a success. Firstly, my Dad, Tim, whose generosity allowed the project to exist and continue by donating the use of the land. Many hands helped for a day or two and have made their mark on the place. Joan Engle for many months helped tend creatures there in my absence; Michelle, Andy, Luke and Kristina have done so more recently. Jean Fetty provided good company over lunch for many an afternoon under his big purple beech tree that always hosts a nice breeze. Many people have donated various things here and there, like water, cookies, and money, all of which sustained me. Father Walter passed a big donation at the beginning of the current growing season and allowed me to purchase the seeds and other start-up costs, which was momentous and humbling. So many people have blessed the project with tremendous kindness, sorry for not naming you all but you know who you are and the gift will come to you too, especially when most in need.
The thirteenth century Persian poetry master, Hafiz, said, “Does the Sun ever say to the Earth / even after all these years, / ‘You owe me!’ / A love like that / lights up the whole sky.” Regardless of the project’s future or where I’ll be, I look forward to another year of growth in a universe that never stops giving.
Sincerely,
Elliot Martin
Does the Sun ever say to the Earth
Even after all these years
‘You owe me!’
A love like that
lights up the whole sky.
-- Hafiz