Pruning, to bear more fruit

It might hurt, but it's necessary.

Life today requires a leap of faith, but not a blind one. Sixteen years ago, I trusted fate too much and drove right out of my boyfriend’s steeply sloped parking lot into a dense fog. Hidden in that fog was a black BMW, the driver speeding downhill and distracted by her tall latte. She T-boned the brand-new Scion I’d purchased just three months prior, the only new car I’ve ever owned.

The fault was mine, not the driver’s, as I’m the one who blindly trusted the fog would simply envelop me in hope and love for a new day. Instead, as fogs often do, it obscured a dark force that doesn’t care about you, doesn’t see you, will barrel right through you if you get in its way.

As some of you know from my note, our kid was on the first carrier sent to the Middle East.

So it’s been a rough couple of months. We were more tuned into what’s going on in Iran than most people because Zander was there before Operation Epic Fury even launched.

What we’ve seen since is astounding. It’s hard to imagine 1940s media broadcasting Hitler’s lies and propaganda as if they were fact, but our media parrots the Iranian regime’s claims as if we should take them at face value, as if they’re not part of the fog of war. As a journalist and democratic citizen, I believe in a free press, but we shouldn’t actively work on behalf of the enemy to win the hearts and minds of the populace.

Zander tells us he’s OK, that his carrier is the safest place in the Middle East.

Trolls on that note took offense at the pride I expressed for his Navy career. I’ve cropped out who they are because they don’t deserve the attention, but I’m sharing a couple examples because it’s important not to remain blind to bad behavior.

When I shared a subsequent note about tying a yellow ribbon around a tree for Zander, even more trolls descended. But maybe I don’t need to remind you how terrible people can be online, as you’ve likely experienced this for yourself.

Fortunately, the nearly 300 other people who responded to these posts were supportive; thank you again 🙏 if you were one of them. Between those expressions, the thoughts and prayers of the people in my real life, and my own strengthening connection with God, I felt a calm descend upon me. Hearing from Zander in the midst of it all that he’s OK was a blessing.

Another balm these days is a new friend, a homesteader. She taught me how to milk, and together we milk her cows by hand once a week. I don’t have any pictures of her cows—Belle and Bessie—to show you because I think it would be obnoxious of me to turn our time together into a photo shoot. Belle, the one I milk, is what my friend calls “a children’s storybook cow,” with curving horns, big brown eyes, and thick lashes. I milk her right into a pail, and I’m not bad at it for an aging former city slicker. I take this milk home to drink, still warm and steaming, and it’s the best-tasting milk I’ve ever had.

I don’t think I’ve quoted Biblical scripture even once before in my 35 years as a writer, but here we go. I’m attending a Christian church for the first time, too, at least the first time of my own choosing. The pastor recently referred to this verse from the book of John, and it’s perfect:

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. (15:1-2)

Think about that: God takes away the branches that bear no fruit, and even those that do produce fruit get pruned, so they will bear even more fruit.

Once my husband and I decided we wanted to return to a small town to live, it still took us six years to make the move. One of the reasons was my worry that we wouldn’t have access to the right food. By right, I mean fresh vegetables and fruit, preferably organic, and pasture-raised animal products, preferably regenerative. Even when we finally made the move last May, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to match the network of farmer’s markets, buying clubs, and strategic Whole Foods Paycheck purchases I’d built to put food on our table.

But here I am, less than a year later, with something much better—and simpler—than all that. So the pruning has borne more fruit.

Belle likes it when I scratch under her neck, but I don’t reach over her horns, heeding my friend’s warning. Cows aren’t really pets, though Belle moos a loud greeting as soon as she sees my truck headed down the drive. Maybe that’s because she likes me, or maybe it’s because she knows I’m there to relieve her of her burden. Cows make more milk than their calves can drink; they’ve been bred toward that for millennia, and indeed, milk and our tolerance for drinking it were game changers in human evolution and probably the basis for civilization itself.

My husband can only drink this raw milk, as pasteurized no longer contains the enzymes he needs to digest it.

My friend and I talk while we milk, the rhythm of our work providing an oasis for sharing. A truly safe space, if you will. With chickens wandering by, a dog aptly named Bandit often slips in to lap up spilt milk. One of my friend’s homeschooled kids will show up with a bottle to feed the new lambs. Their mother, Fizz, is suffering worms despite all attempts to heal her and not producing milk for her lambs, so they must be bottle fed. I do have this one picture of them that my husband took the week they were born.

This is one of three farms we visit to purchase food in our new rural community, where we’re closer to the source.

At another one, I’ve been regularly buying sourdough bread, as it’s been yet another tough year. This time I’ve walked through the fire of difficult truths and tried in vain to get justice. And I survived a major relocation in the midst of that; sometimes a tree needs to be pruned back aggressively! So I’ve been buying bread made by this farmer’s hands instead of my own even though I have a whole catalog history on sourdough right here at Brunette Gardens.

When the temperature climbed into the balmy 70s in March, I tried to reactivate my sourdough, to no avail. It had been a year since I’d fed it. You really can’t neglect the needs of a living thing—a lesson from my childhood writ large.

With all that spring milk, and the eggs from my friend’s chickens, I made strawberry ice cream. Maybe I’ll share that recipe with you if you like—let me know in the comments.

For now, though, I’m thinking of planting carrots in one of these raised beds, which I scored for free from our agricultural extension office. They’re repurposed shipping crates.

You can see I added logs to the beds, to create a hugelkultur inside them. The logs will decompose, feeding the soil and whatever I plant in the bed. Perhaps carrots. As I mentioned in this—one of my first Brunette Gardens posts from four years ago—a blocky variety will work best in our clay soil.

If you're not growing carrots, you don't know what's up, doc

But maybe with a raised bed and my lasagne layers of decomposing logs and hay mixed in with the soil, in addition to some cow manure from my friend’s farm, I could try one of those fancy varieties that are longer and thinner, like ‘Cosmic purple.’ A reader on Notes suggested ‘Black nebula,’ which to me sounds like a carrot poem.

That mess behind the raised beds in the photo above is my rescued asparagus.

When we moved last year, my husband, brother, and I dug up the asparagus, as it’s a perennial that will keep you in spears for as many as thirty years. I touted its benefits in another early post.

The lazy gardener's vegetable: asparagus

I replanted it last fall after it sat all summer in pots, waiting for me to recover not just from moving but from experiencing what felt like fresh trauma. When traumatic memories—ones your mind buried because you couldn’t possibly comprehend what you experienced as a small child—fully resurface, it doesn’t matter if it’s been decades since the traumas occurred. You’ll feel it all as if it just happened.

The asparagus bed has been wintering under a layer of hay and hasn’t produced any spears yet. I hope it will. I’m grateful for Tanja Westfall-Greiter, who assured me it was possible when I asked her about digging up and transplanting established asparagus. But this is not a blind hope, as the crowns sat in those pots over a drought summer before I finally found a new home for them. It’s likely they didn’t make it, and I’ll have to start over, which will mean waiting another three years for a new bed to mature.

So many living things we left behind: apple, plum, persimmon, and serviceberry trees; three kinds of mint; aster and echinacea and valerian, just to name a few of the more than 100 trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses, and herbs we planted over eight years in the old place. We dug up as much as we could transplant, and it’s still too early to tell what all has survived in the new garden and what has not.

This celandine poppy seems to have made the transition just fine.

The same week Operation Epic Fury launched, we got the news that the mature white ash tree in our new front yard is diseased. It’s infected with emerald ash borer and was planted too shallowly, its roots exposed so that the tree will quickly weaken and become unstable.

I love this tree, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to buy the house, for this beautiful white ash giving valuable shade on the south-facing side in the summertime. But it’s good for me to come out of my blindness to its diseased state. It’s likely to be gutted by the borer in as little as three years’ time and topple onto our house. The experts strongly recommend removal, not just to save our house but to prevent the ash borer from spreading to neighboring trees.

Likewise, back at my friend’s farm, poor Fizz might need to be culled, for the health of the sheep herd, as you need mothers who are able to feed their young.

We can’t blindly assume all will be well, that all things will grow and bear fruit. We need to look, and see, and prune. Pruning is a cut, a violence. It hurts to lose a cherished tree, or to leave an established garden, or to cull a sheep you’ve named and rubbed on the nose and thought of as part of your own flock.

It hurts even more to prune back in our human relationships, whether abusive family or friends. While it can be relatively easy to block an online troll or unsubscribe from a newsletter whose writer disappoints you, it’s a lot harder to excise a diseased branch of your own family tree, or trim out the dead wood in a relationship that’s holding you back from new, healthy growth.

When I hit the gas in my shiny new Scion that day, exiting out of my boyfriend’s parking lot and into the fog, the resulting T-bone crash was a cut, a necessary pruning. The man whose house I’d just left didn’t wanted to be my emergency contact—not that day or any other. He never even came out to check on me. I brushed off the broken glass and walked back to his door, where he told me to return to my vehicle and wait for the ambulance to arrive, alone.

I was still sitting there by myself when they came to put me on a stretcher.

Our relationship ended that day, not just our romantic one, but the friendship at its base as well because friends don’t leave you alone like that.

Pruning that diseased branch led to healthy new growth: I met my husband not long afterward. That was sixteen years ago. Our marriage has born fruit and will continue to bear fruit all the rest of our days.

Have you likewise been pruned recently? Or do you have any branches that need removing?