Pruning

Although I think about (and write about) gardening a lot, I hope I’ve made it clear that I am by no means an expert gardener. In fact, I often plant something, entirely forget about it, and then find myself delightfully surprised by an unexpected harvest! It’s one of the things I like most about outdoor gardening, how most plants can pretty much keep themselves alive as long as you make sure the soil has enough nourishment.

My other main failing as a gardener is that I tend to lose enthusiasm and fail to finish out the season. By the time October or November come around, I’ve spent so much time weeding, harvesting, and then figuring out what to do with all that harvest that I don’t have much motivation to do things like pruning. Or pulling out the dead plants. Or keeping my garden from looking like an overgrown graveyard of last summer’s hopes and dreams.

It doesn’t help that in my area of the world, the line between still growing and “no, really, that brown thing is dead” is a bit blurry. I still have flowers on some of my plants. The apples are still happily hanging on the tree branches. And our snap peas are still green! So when it comes to things like pruning back raspberries, which all the books say I should be doing right now, it’s a little hard, because two weeks ago my kids were still eating them. Are they really dormant? Or should I let it go a few more weeks?

But in a few more weeks it’ll be really cold and miserable here, perfect for curling up by the fire with a book and less perfect for crouching on the ground with some garden shears. Suffice it to say that my end of season gardening game could use a little work.

But this year, unlike years past, I’m finding myself gravitating towards my autumn garden more. There’s something about stepping away from my screens, my books - even the thoughts inside my head - stepping away from all of that is appealing to me. It feels a little like pulling up the drawbridge on my life. Like not inviting in the voices that mean to manipulate, enrage, or hurt me. Like creating my own little echo chamber where all I can hear are the birds, the occasional car passing by, and the snip snip of my clippers.

It’s hard to prune away those branches that gave such good fruit last year. It’s sad to cut the browning perennials now to the ground. But if I don’t, those root systems will keep feeding dead branches. The plant’s grown will be stunted, it will flower poorly and fruit even worse. There’s a wisdom in getting rid of old growth so that we can let our resources go to where possibility awaits. As the year comes to an end, it’s only right that we gratefully let go of what served us in the past, and start redirecting our energy towards what will serve us in the future.