Samhain's Work: Forgiving the Wasted Harvest

Clearing the garden. Grieving lost community.

We name everything in our house. (I’m accidentally on purpose raising animists, clearly.)

Our one luxury item, the hot tub; her name is Linda.
The pandemic era exercise bike’s name is Bob.
The garden is called An Obair. The Work.

One weekend in May a couple of years ago, we put in a vegetable garden. We’d wanted to do it for ages, but we meant it when we named our land The Burren (meaning “rocky place” in Irish) after that moonscape stretch of County Clare. Digging through the scrim of soil and levering out the granite chunks, slabs, and boulders beneath was the hardest thing my husband and I ever did together. Though I question the sentiment now, at the time, I said it was even more difficult than childbirth.

Once everything was completed, we were all full of the passion of new gardeners. We did what we could to marry our dreams with the limited scope of our skill. An experienced gardener helped us draw grids and make an intentional plan. She asked all the right questions about what we actually liked to eat and taught us the basics of companion planting.

We kinda remembered her counsel when we went to that sweet farm collective in the next valley over and started piling seedlings onto trays. I couldn’t trust in the bounty to come, so I bought too much and crowded too many plants together. It was only a small rectangle of raised beds after all.

Soon, it was clear I wasn’t brave enough to thin the riot of new growth. The borage was my most powerful adversary. It seemed so sure of itself as it threatened to take over it all. It was meant to protect the plants we’d want to eat; who was I to tell it not to do its job to the best of its ability? Plus, the flowers were almost beautiful enough to help you ignore the thick hairy stems.

Little Dude McCool’s one and only time in the garden.

Borage, my feelings for you are… complicated.

And then, the neglect.

It began when we were away for the week of the fourth of July. We came home to withering stalks and kale lacy with bug bites. The semi-established pattern of care disrupted and new horticultural responsibilities cropping up with each new summer day, I just didn’t have the capacity or the presence of mind to keep up with the rolling harvest. We’d dump bags of tomatoes on the doorsteps of willing neighbors, but many withered on the vine. (Though my gardener friend asked the right questions, I hadn’t really considered my decision re: planting four different types of tomatoes when I’m really the only one who appreciates them!)

The next year, we got a puppy. The hours that might have been devoted to weeding and harvesting were devoured by long walks and giving myself permission to occasionally read books (often about regenerative ecosystems, ironically) on the new chaise longue they gave me for Mother’s Day.

As the summer dawned, the garden self-seeded in a riot of tomatoes and tomatillos. Without a bit of 2024 effort, we had all the garden action we could handle.

Then came 2025. Maybe I was just too exhausted. Maybe I was wise enough not to commit to one more under-resourced hobby. Plus, the family needs were tough enough that spring. All my emotional energy was poured into parenting, and when I needed an escape, all I wanted to do was take a walk with the dog, which was often the only opportunity I had to allow my mind, body, and imagination to truly roam.

I planted a little bit, hoping to feeling a little bit worthy of all that initial, ground-breaking effort, but a garden was just one more potentially beautiful, overly dependent thing.

But still, An Obair, The Work, grew. The unstoppable self-seeding tomatoes and tomatillos again took over more than half of the beds. I’d pop in to pick a few for my breakfast omelettes, but I didn’t have the strength to fill a bowl with sunshine red delights that no one else would eat. Bagging them up to drop with the folks next door was beyond me at the time. The lettuces and kale I’d planted from seed, and which I’d remembered to pick occasionally at the start of the summer, eventually became sprawling, inedible monsters.

And now, on the other side of the relentless, glorious growing season…

This past weekend offered us one of those perfect late October Sundays in the Hudson Valley. The leaves were in their goldest glory as the low slung cloud shone white and glowered gray in the pure blue sky. In that light, anything was possible—except going inside to deal with the four loads of laundry. So I looked for any reason to stay outside, including planting a poor neglected fir that my uncle gave us two Christmases before.

After that, I tried to convince Mike to let me mow the lawn, but I could see he wanted to lose himself in the meditative act of grinding the leaves back into the grass. He suggested I turn my restless energy to the gardens, and I knew that the neglectful streak had, at last, reached its end.

Opening that garden gate, still too new and unused to muster a proper creak, it was like greeting my own failures.

These plants, some intentionally sown and others unruly volunteers… They had asked so little of me, and nevertheless they persisted. They were hardy and bold, and they’d been so willing to give, even when all they had to depend on were the rare summer rains and the occasional guilty Goudy who spared a few minutes to turn on the hose.

This is the story of a neglected garden.
This is the story of neglect in relation to human community.

This fall, as we’ve navigated unschooling my daughter in order to restore her mental health and restore her inner world, I’ve had to reckon with many deep, unexpected wounds related to community.

Generally, these are scars, not fresh cuts. They existed long before this rupture in our connection to the school community (such as it is, and such as it is not) and my daughter’s circle of acquaintances.

These community wounds are mine. Some of them I have already passed on to my children, I fear. Some are deeply personal. I’m doing what I can to prevent the wounds from wintering over and reseeding into another season and into my beloveds’ lives.

While clearing the gardens of all that wasted fruit and all those neglected greens, I got to—had to—mourn the lost opportunities, the missed the connections, the miscalculations that led to broken promises and plans.

As I tugged the tendrils of vine that still held a few healthy, hearty tomatoes and tried to separate them from the wasted stalks, I let myself wonder about when the failures to maintain and build community were my own. I traced through the painful memories of when others failed me, and when it was probably all just an unfortunate misunderstanding. And, of course, I landed on the explanation for everything nowadays: in modernity, no single individual deserves the blame, but you can simply look to the broken systems that force our nuclear families into atomized, disconnected little entities that are struggling alone, eternally separated from that sacred, elusive whole.

It’s wider the system, sure, but this is my garden.

The seeds I failed to nourish. The plants I didn’t know how to tend. The vegetables that that didn’t suit our palate. The climate that was too unpredictable and the soil that could support a few seedlings, but not all.

The new people I never followed up with and the faithful friends I took for granted. The challenges of accommodating the expectations or idiosyncratic needs of others (impossible when I didn’t have the support I needed at the core). All the ways that we are—I am—so wrapped up in the busy, the scarcity, and the burden of maintaining the fragile status quo and routine.

Community in it deep and original sense is rare and difficult to find these days, and it’s not all my fault, sure, but this is my sense of belonging.
How had I tended it? How had I neglected it? How had I been neglected?

The shadow metaphors we excavate at Samhain-time

This is the moment when I hear my dearest allies and caring folk rush in to say “ah, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

Really, I don’t think I am being unduly hard. It’s the darkening time of the year, the time when the long nights set in and we’re called to look within, down the very bones of what’s true in our lives.

I am striving for forgiveness as I try to look at what was and what is. I am also striving to be honest about the role I have played in the dissolution of extended family bonds and broken friendships. I am allowing myself to mourn the ways I have been neglected and the ways I have been neglectful, too.

Initially, I had the best of intentions with that garden, and put in the work for a while. But priorities, interest, and capacity changed. This season, as a result, I reaped more wasted produce that nourishing harvest.

That breaks my heart. And that heartbreak is another opportunity. Eventually.

Because here’s something that’s true: Samhain is the final harvest. There’s no going back. No matter how the growing season went, now that the frost has set in, we’re in the fallow time. As we enter the fallow times, we can take stock, reset, and let the regrets compost with the wasted tomatillos. (Who has a recipe for tomatillos? I did bring in an impressive—oppressive?—haul the other day, and they’re just staring at me from the colander in the corner.)

So yes, we are in the fallow time, but do you know what rides the coattails of the Samhain hag? The trust that rebirth is waiting, just on the other side of the next season. No matter how the last growing season went, there is every possibility for a sustainable, fruitful, abundant and life-giving spring to come.

But first, the wintering. The time of deepest rest and restoration.

My Samhain Blessings for You

A few final words on Samhain, this extended moment when the veils are thin, when the gods, ancestors, and our beloved dead are as close as close can be.

You better believe I was speaking with every kindly ghost and guide who happened by as I let a few tears fall into our fallen garden. They’ve lingered with me, long after I scrubbed the dirt from beneath my nails, and they’ve been helping me sort through what needs to be saved and what must be composted as I lay these gardens—and my grief—down to sleep.

To step through the Samhain portal is to step into a new year. As is the way with all beginnings in the Celtic understanding of the world, the year begins in darkness. In this liminal space, in this darkness that is both fallow and fertile all once, I wish you comfort, quiet, and an abiding sense of rest. May you find wisdom in this season of death and, when the moment is right, find hope in the sacred and inevitable rebirth to come.

Last thing: I pray you’ll find a soul-deep, bedrock-anchored sense of forgiveness for all that neglect of the past seasons, in your vegetable garden and in your human community.

That’s the only way we rise again to begin, together, anew.