Enough for the Winter?

There comes a point every autumn when the work begins to change.

For months, the garden has asked us to keep moving. Planting becomes weeding, weeding becomes watering, watering becomes harvesting, and harvesting becomes preserving. There is always another basket to bring inside, another herb ready to cut, another tomato demanding to become something before it becomes nothing.

Then November arrives.

The garden grows quieter. Frost settles some of the decisions we have been postponing. The last tender plants finally surrender, leaves collect along the edges of beds, and suddenly we can see spaces that have been hidden beneath green since May.

There is still work to do, of course.

The chickens need preparing for colder weather. The bees need enough stores to carry them through winter. Tools need cleaning and putting away. Beds need tending. Herbs gathered months ago need sorting into jars and bottles. Food finds its way into the pantry and freezer.

But the urgency begins to change.

For most of human history, this time of year carried a question with considerably greater consequences than it does for many of us today:

Do we have enough?

Enough food.

Enough fuel.

Enough medicine.

Enough put away to carry the household, the animals, and ourselves through the months when the landscape would provide considerably less.

Modern life has largely hidden that calculation from us.

Food appears on grocery-store shelves regardless of season. Heat arrives without our having gathered the wood. Medicines, household goods, and nearly anything else we might need can often be purchased without much thought about where they came from, how far they traveled, or what season produced them.

There are obvious conveniences in that.

But convenience can also create distance.

When strawberries appear in an Ohio supermarket while snow is falling outside, it becomes remarkably easy to forget that strawberries have a season at all. We become consumers of abundance rather than participants in it.

And perhaps something important was lost when enough stopped being something we regularly had to consider.

Knowing What Enough Looks Like

We live in a culture that is remarkably good at teaching us to want more.

More space. More money. More possessions. More productivity. More experiences. More followers. More growth.

Even gardening isn't immune.

There is always another bed we could build, another variety we could grow, another project that could make next year's garden bigger or better.

I am certainly not immune to this.

A gardener looking at an unused patch of ground is perfectly capable of regarding it as a personal challenge. But the end of the growing season offers a useful correction. Eventually, there isn't another tomato to pick. There isn't another flush of basil coming. There isn't another month to make the garden produce more.

What remains is what we have gathered.

And then the question becomes not How much more can I produce? but What can I do with what I have?

That is a very different way of measuring abundance.

The Pantry and the Apothecary

I love looking at shelves this time of year.

Not because they are necessarily full—some years are more generous than others—but because nearly everything on them represents a small act of participation. Dried herbs harvested months earlier. Tinctures slowly extracting in their jars. Seeds saved for spring.

Honey pulled from the hives during summer. Preserves, dried foods, roots, oils, vinegars, and all the other things that accumulate when we take some portion of abundance and deliberately save it for later.

None of these things appeared instantly. They are summer stored in another form.

A jar of dried calendula is sunshine from July. A bottle of tincture contains plants gathered when they were at their best. A packet of seeds holds a garden that doesn't exist yet.

And a jar of honey contains thousands upon thousands of journeys made by bees to flowers that have long since disappeared.

There is something deeply reassuring about that.

Not because the shelves promise complete self-sufficiency. They don't, and I don't think they need to. They remind us that we participated.

We planted some things. We tended some things. We gathered and preserved some things. Other things came from farmers, growers, makers, and people whose work connects us to the land in ways our own skills or circumstances cannot.

The point isn't to provide everything for ourselves. The point is to remember that abundance comes from somewhere. We noticed it when it appeared. And we saved some of it.

Enough Doesn't Mean Everything

There is an important difference between participating in our own provision and believing that we must provide absolutely everything ourselves.

I don't grow all of our food.

I don't make everything we use.

I don't know how to do every traditional skill I admire.

And despite having an apothecary full of herbs, there are circumstances in which what I need comes from a pharmacy rather than the garden.

That doesn't diminish the value of what we can do.

Self-reliance doesn't have to mean isolation.

For generations, households relied upon networks of farmers, tradespeople, healers, craftspeople, neighbors, family members, and communities. One person didn't need to know everything because knowledge, skills, and resources existed among many people.

Perhaps that, too, belongs in our definition of enough.

Enough isn't possessing everything.

Sometimes it is knowing what you have, knowing what you can do, knowing who grew or made the things you cannot—and knowing where to turn when you need something beyond your own skills.

The Season of Enough

Soon the garden will become very quiet. There will still be chores. Animals have little interest in our romantic notions of winter rest, and anyone who has carried water through freezing weather knows that seasonal living isn't always particularly picturesque.

But the relentless production of summer will be finished.

The bees will cluster inside their hives.

The chickens will settle into the shorter rhythm of winter days.

Perennial plants will retreat underground.

Seeds will wait.

And perhaps we can allow ourselves to do a little of the same.

There will be another growing season.

There will be another list of projects.

There will undoubtedly be another ridiculous number of plants I decide we absolutely must grow.

But not yet.

November is a good time to look at what the year has given us—and what we've managed to make from it.

Some things succeeded.

Some things failed.

Some plans never happened at all.

Still, there are herbs in the apothecary. Food in the pantry. Honey in jars. Seeds waiting for spring. Animals settled into their winter homes. Knowledge gained from another year of doing this work.

Perhaps abundance isn't always measured by how much we can accumulate.

Sometimes abundance is being connected enough to recognize where the things that sustain us come from—and participating, however imperfectly, in providing some of them.

And sometimes it is simply being able to look around at what we've gathered, grown, learned, made, preserved, bought from others, and shared and recognize:

There is enough here to carry us forward.