Harvesting in order to Save; Destroying in order to Heal

The western mind loves dichotomous thinking. Either or, black and white, this or that, no contradiction may be left standing; the western mind cannot fathom the idea of something being and not being. Aristotle and his laws of non-contradiction and identity are so deeply ingrained into our minds that we shiver with the thought of disregarding them.

However, poison can sometimes be medicine, and vice versa.

This week in my garden, I had to practice this as I needed to kind of destroy my swiss chard (Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris) in order to save it from the extreme heat we are having at the moment.

We live in a water-scarce area, but we had some good rains during the last rainy season. I have a couple of water storage tanks; I thus have enough water at the moment. But this does not stop the heat from taking its toll.

But I realized something:

It is only the outer leaves of my swiss chard that is getting damaged by the heat.

Every evening most of the leaves look fine again. It is only during the day with the extreme heat that some of the lower leaves get burnt really badly. I had a thought: why not prune or cut away most of the leaves so that only the essential ones (i.e., the baby leaves) are left? And it worked!

However, now I am left with over a kilogram of swiss chard! What a nice problem to have though. (It is about $5 worth of food in my country. It is not an expensive vegetable, but I like to do these conversions in my head sometimes to see how much my crops are worth!)

| Swiss chard before harvesting |

Giving a Hard Cut/Haircut

My garden is a zero-waste circular system. So even the food I do not eat goes into the compost so that I can grow more food. The sun did some damage to some of the swiss chard plants.

Some of the leaves burnt beyond any chance of getting them back up again. Some turned yellow. Others burnt partially. But I wanted to harvest everything from this one flowerbed.

I separated the two harvests: one for the kitchen, and one for the compost.

I really cut them back hard, leaving only about two or three leaves. I think they will grow back abundantly soon, but for now, I can already see that the hard cutback helped them. The day after I saw how much damage the sun did to my crops and after the hard cutback, the swiss chard showed no damage at all. The leaves did not even look sad one bit!

| Left: food for the compost; Right: food for me |

Below you can see just how much I took off:

| Before the harvest |

| After the harvest |

Swiss Chard and Philosophical Life Lessons

I love to get my sustenance from my garden, but also mental sustenance. I try to see all of the life lessons one can gain from the garden whilst I work in the garden. Maybe you have thought about some of these things, but I want to share them in any case.

Sometimes a good trimming is needed to get rid of the old so that you can make space for the new.

After trimming one of the swiss chard plants, I saw new leaves on the stem. Baby ones that needed more sun. As I cut the old leaves off, the idea of a potential life lesson sprung to my mind. To give the new leaves a good chance to survive, the old leaves that keep the sun away needed to be cut off. It is a painful process, and some plants might even die. The young leaves might also die. But the potential of new growth is hidden behind the old.

But the old do not have to go wasted. It can still be useful.

| Old leaf |

Cutting away that which is old and in need of clearing can still provide sustenance.

Food nourished the body, and essential nutrients that our bodies cannot make need to come from the outside. Moreover, we need energy to also make the essential nutrients that our bodies can make.

But putting bad or poor fuel into your body will in the long run do more harm. Getting rid of the old can provide us with food so that our bodies can function.

Nature is brutal, and sometimes it destroys everything. (Humans too.) But we can in moderation harvest so that the plant stays alive. Nature will provide us with an almost infinite supply of food. Again the contradiction:

By partially destroying the plant, we help ourselves and the plant to stay alive.

Below I share with you two photographs, the first is of a swiss chard plant I did not trim. The second is of a plant I did trim. The difference is very noticeable.

| Untrimmed swiss chard |

| Trimmed swiss chard |

A last lesson thus might be that our roots can only handle so much. We as humans can also only handle so much at one time. A good trimming might help with making us light again, unburdening ourselves.

Postscriptum, or Harvesting a Kilogram of Swiss Chard

A kilogram of swiss chard is a lot of food.

I have no idea what I will make with it. I have eaten two different swiss chard dishes, I have given away. And now there are still left on the plants in need of more harvesting!

Nature, when she gives, gives in abundance.

I hope you learned something from this post. All of the photographs are my own, taken with my iPhone, and all of the musings are my own. I hope you are well. Happy gardening and stay safe!