A Weekly Update from Wayward Haven Farm
As always, we welcome your comments, questions, or suggestions. You can find previous updates here, and you can follow the weekly reflections on living well over at From the Hermit’s Porch.
This week’s “Porch” post: Finding Your Way Back When the Brain Has Other Plans When the mind runs ahead, it isn’t misbehaving — it’s doing what it was built to do. The practice is simply noticing when we’ve been pulled away and gently returning. “The noticing is the return.” Living well begins with that small act of coming back to what’s actually here.
Every day the farm offers a small invitation to pay attention. Not the frantic kind of attention the world demands, but the older kind — the kind that notices what’s growing, what’s fading, and what’s asking for care. This week, the fields have been especially talkative: cucurbits racing ahead, brassicas finishing their season, weeds rising after rain, insects returning to their work. Together they’re reminding me that attention and rhythm is how we participate in our own becoming — and that what we tend shapes us, just as surely as what we ignore distorts us.
I. Cucurbits — the seduction of speed
Cucumber, zucchini, and squash are finding their stride and demand daily attention or they get too big and less tasty. That’s a good lesson for us all — we grow fast (or think we can), but can we grow too fast? We’ve seen plenty of that in the last twenty years: companies riding economic bubbles only to come crashing down like Icarus getting too close to the sun.
It’s good to let nature do its thing. When we get greedy, we force things; and when we force things, we lose the gift of nature’s slowness — and ourselves in the process. When we tend daily and harvest when ready, we notice what’s happening and lose the need for control. We shift from forcing to caring, from maximizing to accompanying.
“Living well is not about maximizing what grows. It’s about noticing what’s growing, and responding with care. Most of us don’t struggle because we’re unwilling to tend our lives. We struggle because we’re pulled in so many directions that we forget what’s actually growing.”
II. Brassicas — the humility of process
Broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage have moved on. We froze a good bit of the broccolini and it was well‑received at the farmers market. Cauliflower went into pickling brine and will be available this weekend. The cabbage was shredded for sauerkraut and is in its first stage of fermentation. It takes about 3–6 weeks before we move to stage two — canning for storage. We’ll have some on offer in a month or two depending on how long stage one takes — and if everything comes out okay. You never really know.
We’ll keep an eye on it every day and do what it needs, but we also have to trust nature along the way. Fermentation is a kind of faith — you do your part, and then you wait for what you cannot force.
III. Weeds and insects — discernment, not domination
The rain a couple of weeks ago was welcome, and with it came the weeds that compete for nutrients. Weeds aren’t all bad — they add organics and nutrients to the soil — but they still need managing. Weeding is great exercise for the mind and body. It teaches patience and persistence, especially when everything grows so fast after a rain.
Bugs are also out in force. Beneficial insects like spiders, ladybugs, and soldier beetles are doing all they can to help. We watch their work and do our best to protect them, but there are too many less‑beneficial bugs eating our plants and fruits too quickly for us not to act.
Weeding teaches me that tending a life isn’t about control — it’s about discernment.
“Attention isn’t hard because we lack discipline. It’s hard because the world keeps asking us to look everywhere but here.”
IV. The world’s speed vs. nature’s rhythm
As I’ve written this week, I’ve realized how much we’re pulled toward keeping up with a world that is speeding up and leaving us behind. Gardening teaches us that nature takes its own time. Even as the climate shifts (everything is two weeks to a month earlier than usual now), nature is doing what nature does. Some things thrive, some struggle — but as Jurassic Park so poignantly reminds us, life finds a way.
Speed, though, is wreaking havoc on our wellbeing. It eats at our capacity to live well.
We are creatures with an ancient biology captured by the lure of “more,” thinking there’s never “enough.” And nature keeps signaling to us to slow down, to ground ourselves in rhythms that make sense, to reclaim our attention, and to believe that what is is enough.
If there’s a bottom line here, it’s not profit — unless you mean the profit of wisdom or the soul. It’s that we have the power to see what’s happening to us: growing too fast to sustain, let alone live well, and that we can nudge ourselves out of the chaos and into a rhythm that helps us make sense of ourselves and our place in the world.
Living well isn’t about outpacing the world — it’s about rooting ourselves in a rhythm that can hold us. Nature isn’t asking us to keep up. It’s asking us to pay attention.
A takeaway
Everything on the farm is teaching the same quiet lesson: growth without tending becomes chaos, but growth with attention becomes coherence. Cucurbits remind me not to outrun my own form. Brassicas teach me to trust the slow work I cannot see. Weeds and insects ask for discernment, not domination. And the whole of nature keeps whispering that life has its own rhythm — one that doesn’t demand speed, only presence. Living well begins when we choose that rhythm, again and again, and let it shape the life we’re growing.