A Word From the Pumpkin Patch

Back in June we planted a pumpkin patch. Not just a couple seeds but hundreds of seeds, maybe thousands. Josh went to great lengths to mow the half acre or so field in front of Mom’s house. We had imaginings of “no-till” farming; giant pumpkins, profits to pay the taxes, and maybe even a fun little job for Mom and Maggie selling them at the farmers market in the fall. Josh plowed around 16 long rows by hand with a tiller. It was grueling work. I spent hours and hours just carefully planting and fertilizing. Then after they came up there was the thinning of plants. I even was industrious and spent one whole Saturday transplanting seedlings to spots that had not come up. I found early on that Mom and Maggie did not share my zeal for the patch’s success and Josh simply had no time given the vineyard demands.

Even so, in late June it was looking good. We had a lot of seedlings and the rains had been steady and kind. Then July got real dry. The plants became limp during the day. Watering was necessary. We invested a couple hundred dollars in hoses and a giant sprinkler. This was on top of the hundred or so in seed and fertilizer. Of course, our time was not valued for this endeavor. We soon found that neither the well for my house or Mom’s would support a good soaking for the pumpkin patch. I would hook up to my house; it would run for about 20 minutes then shut off leaving my house without water for an hour. Mom’s well is sturdier but her vision for the pumpkin patch returns was not strong enough to risk a house without water.

I guess looking back it was around the first week of July that my enthusiasm began to waver. I continued to put time in hoeing around the plants to keep the grass and weeds back, and I mowed religiously between the rows. I prayed a lot for rain. And that seemed to work. We started to get more rain later in July and the plants that had not died from drought really took off. We had lost about 30 percent of the crop but I found renewed hope as small pumpkins formed on the vines. “We could still have some to sell,” I told a skeptical Josh. The rains brought an unintended blessing in the way of grass and weeds around the plants. In the spirit of organic farming, we had chosen not to apply the recommended herbicide nor insecticide. The weeds quickly got beyond my ability to hand hoe. Then in mid-August I noticed the tiny grey bugs and thousands of brown eggs on the leaves. I went around by hand the last week of August and smashed eggs and pulled infested leaves. The handwriting was on the wall ,but I refused to give up hope.

Then this week as Maggie and I trudged through the dewy patch just after day break as we do each morning on our way to feed “those damn chickens” - this is another story about the false glamour of hobby farming – and run a few laps around the vineyard, the patch spoke to me. I was walking along, Maggie and the cats and Hudson trailing behind, and I said out loud to who ever might be listening, “I sure have worked hard in this pumpkin patch to have it just completely fail.” My admittance that the patch has failed was critical. Up till that morning I hung on to hope and had even considered spending another Saturday hoeing weeds and squishing bugs or even buying chemicals to apply. But let me just be honest, the patch is done for. I mean the fruit out there is tiny and starting to rot and we are six weeks from Halloween. Not more than 20 of the original 2 million plants are even alive.

What the patch said promptly back to me was this, “Carla, sometimes you have to work smart not just hard and you can’t expect great fruit if you are going to just half way do something.” What a kick in the teeth coming from this patch that I have spent frankly more time with than any human I know over the last few months, but oh how true and how applicable to my life. I am always trying to do a bunch of things OK and not really anything 100 percent. What a 101 lesson, but I can’t be the only one that hopes against hope as something fails; wanting to hang on, praying for a miracle. Looking back I see a familiar pattern with how I reacted to the patch. As it declined, I sort of backed off feeling disappointed and helpless rather than jumping in with both feet regardless of cost. If only in July, I had hauled in water or created a grey water system, bought the right chemicals, sharpened my hoe. But, I wasn’t willing to invest another few hundred dollars and countless hours. I couldn’t because I have to work and sleep and eat. The return at best on the patch, according to our projections was about $600. Deduct the $200 already in it and you have a $400 profit. That does not pay my mortgage, let alone the taxes.

I found myself today going back to a great book I read this year by Seth Godin called The Dip. My good friend Dan Bihn turned me on to Godin. He talks about dips, cul de sacs and cliffs. Life and business in general are full of these points and it’s the smart people that learn how to determine which one of these they are facing before it’s too late or too many resources or emotions or whatever have been applied. The dips are those tough places you have to just push through. You have a vision and in your heart you know that this is your destiny whether it is a marriage, company or pumpkin patch. Cul de sacs are dead ends that will just suck the life out of you. They are much like mountains that we go around and around being confronted with the same lessons over and over but never quite getting it. Cliffs represent, well as the word implies, long hard falls.

What’s my take home message? Don’t start what I am not sure I am willing to finish with excellence. Be realistic about how much I can do which at this point is about two things well. Brutally evaluate whatever I am doing at the first signs of discontent, failure, or loss under the dip, cul de sac or cliff system. And finally don’t be afraid to admit the patch has failed, cut my losses and retrench.

Godin on “The Dip”
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/