In this viscerally bountiful essay, Nicole Civita, founder of otherWise, reflects on an intimate relationship to her home garden, the garden of her grandparents, and the cornucopial harvest shared between time. She invites us to lift every holy leaf, relish most ripe Jersey tomatoes, hang herbs on every possible hook, and most of all: to share with trust. Trust that more is coming through all possible avenues of care and reciprocity, not just of what we have given, but the returning of the cosmolocal laws – abundance trusts its destination. A warm invitation to provisioning dynamics for the Harvest Moon cycle.
Contributor bio
Nicole Civita is trying to make a home at the crossroads of devotion and discernment. She’s a little bit obsessed with peering into the cracks and sharing what she sees – in all its brutality and beauty. An integrative lawyer turned educator, writer, and weaver of wor(l)ds, Nicole is the founder of otherWise – tending to its relational integrity, collaborative discernment, and rhythms amid the rumbling.
Winters here are long. Bright white and bone cold. The kind of long-cold that you can still sense even on the most sweltering summer days. There’s a chill that lurks behind the heavy air even now as evening rumbles of August thunder caution us all: Don’t waste a moment of this.
In late April, when we still can’t trust the thaw with anything tender and rooted, the hens are already bathing in wet dust and stretching sunlight, squawking as they shake the winter out of their feathers. After months of cooped up huddling and fending off frostbite, they’re suddenly laying more eggs than we can manage – warm, brown ovals filling wire baskets and banged up cartons faster than we can bake or barter away.
May weekends are purposeful – all about planting in. Cloaked in so much netting, doused in cedarwood oil, I’m outside at all hours. I seem to be trying to shake something – middle age, perhaps – out of my softening body. I squat, my joints click. I reach, my tendons resist. Pause to catch my balance or breath, even for a moment, and the black flies make bloodmeal of me. Too many bites can leave me bedridden, so I enlist my kids for raised-bed prep, hardening off, and direct seeding. Spacing guides aren’t suited for our chaos-tolerant garden, which is watered with hope I rarely muster anywhere else.
Putting a garden in, even a chaotic one, fatigues the decision muscles. Aiming to do right by all these seeds I shake out of their coats, I decide and decide and decide. I narrate these choices aloud, trying to imprint something on my sons. By the time their cells have turned over many times as mine, grocery shelves won’t be stocked as they are today. Weather will do what it wants, trade routes will falter, and the people who never learned to coax food from the ground will feel it first. I want them to trust their observation-honed instincts enough to keep trying, and to know that tending is never just about what you (get to) keep. It’s also about what you thin, what you let go to feed the bugs or the birds, what you offer to others before you know if you’ll have enough for yourself.
We mulch thickly, but with precision. Too close and you’ll smother. Too thin, and every opportunistic life-loving photosynthesizer will crowd out the rest. By the fourth weekend, my kids are careful to stay out of my straw-hat limited line of sight. They drift deep into the woods, too far to hear me ask them to carry out another tray of seedlings.
For weeks, it seems, sorrel and chives are all we carry back in. Throughout June, I stare at my northern garden and doubt it will amount to much. The starts are spindly, the peas tentative, the beans not even close to climbing. I second-guess my planting, worry that we were too late, and envy my friends at lower latitudes who are already eating well and planting succession crops. The deer chomp the second-year rainbow chard down to pale nubs. Slugs are in the cabbage, and someone (who?) is carving holes into the tomatillo leaves. Each year we talk about fencing or trapping, but mostly, I think: Let them have some. Even here, generosity is a choice – and so is deciding what’s worth protecting. Every season the stakes get higher. As floods foul fields all around our region and farmer friends suffer, we know we will need to be more deliberate. For now, so what if the groundhog picks off the still-green gooseberries before we get any? The young bushes are still so small that we’d only get a taste anyhow. With this attitude, maybe it’s no wonder that, even by Solstice, I’m still just harvesting scapes, peas, mint, oregano, and chamomile. Not a meal does this make. Still, I’m not sure patrolling the perimeter or picking off those who are pesky will do much to hasten abundance.
July brings a drawn-out midsummer holding pattern: soil warm but growth reluctant, each plant is focused on setting lots of leaves before showing anything flashy or fruity. I tend to stay inside (and away from the biters) while there’s little for me to do but stare and sweat. My husband faithfully waters when the sky doesn’t. Several times a week, he prowls the beds, sometimes photographing signs of promise, sometimes picking the earliest offerings before they are actually ready. We marvel at the first spiny cucumber, the swelling squash blossoms, the green tomatoes – all small and hard.
“I wish I had the kind of relationships where we could trade abundance without hesitation – where accepting was as natural as offering, and reciprocity was a matter of course, not calculation.”
And then bam! August.
Almost overnight, the plants have conspired to overwhelm me.
Zucchini over-ripen into clubs that thud when I set them gently in the wash bucket. Tomatoes lean heavily on each other, cucumbers multiply in secret under broad green leaves. I come in from the garden with my arms full, counters covered, baskets on the floor.
I’m not sure where to start, just that I must start. After all that waiting, I’m already behind. Abundance tips into overwhelm. Overwhelm into waste, which feels almost unthinkable when I know there are places, right now, where one failed harvest means hunger.
The same sun that sweetens the tomatoes will split their skins if I don’t keep up. Untended, the garden grows, but its best bits don’t nourish.
Abundance feels like the first tomato warm from the vine and the rot you’ll find at the bottom of the bucket if you don’t move fast enough. It asks: What will you do with all this? I find myself asking back: What makes me worthy? I know the answer isn’t in seed trays or jars, but in something older – something I first learned in my grandparents’ garden and kitchen. Some of it begs to be enjoyed as-is, sweet and sun-warm, best eaten before twilight. The rest will have to be changed, tamed, or stored.
I cook. We cook. Entire days with the entire family spent meal prepping and freezer filling. Please do not picture the idyllic canning of a Ball cookbook. Or something Instagrammable at the intersection of #cottagecore and #tradwife. Instead, hear me calling after my husband as he heads to the gas station and food market down the road: “Grab as many tortillas as you can. We’ll fill the freezer with breakfast burritos before school starts.” The kids don’t mind this part, at least not for the first four or five hours.
But that’s just the first weekend.
By the next one, I knock on the neighbor’s door with a paper bag of still-warm tomatoes, green beans snapped just hours before. No answer. Really, no neighbors. The people who own the place also have other “homes” and they don’t seem to need this one much either. So I text offers to friends. Some say they’ll take a little next time they see me and mention awkwardly that they need to go grocery shopping. Others politely decline, as if my offer carries an unspoken obligation. And perhaps it does. (I wonder why that’s so scary.) I wish I had the kind of relationships where we could trade abundance without hesitation – where accepting was as natural as offering, and reciprocity was a matter of course, not calculation.
I think about leaving boxes of bounty on doorsteps, but then I imagine the greens going limp in a crisper drawer. I picture my friends’ repulsed expression as they lift the forgotten mushy mass out of the fridge and into the bin. That can’t be where the story of those seeds I tucked into soil blocks and set under grow lights during an ice storm in March ends. Not when I let my heart burst open with love for seedkin. And not when seeds, in another, much leaner season, could be the difference between scarcity and sufficiency.
I stand at the sink and sink back nearly 4 decades.
“Before long, we’ve covered the table and reinforced the Italian words for all the vegetables we usually call by another name. Piles of pomodori in every shade from green-gold to blood-red, crooked peperoncini, deep purple melanzane, fat wax beans (only called fagioli once cooked), heaps of basilico e prezzemolo, deep emerald escarole, and finocchio with enormous fronds. We haven’t even emptied the box of what I know will be the sweetest sweet corn. And the garden, a surprisingly narrow strip running the length of our shared suburban house, is still giving more out the back window.”
It’s still late summer, but now I’m in the Garden State – New Jersey. And in a very specific garden. The one behind my swing-set. The one tended by my Pop-Pop.
I’m 7 or 8. A little taller than the dining table, and surprised to see Grandma’s lace doily neatly folded almost all the way back. For a minute, the polyvinyl tablecloth is visible. But then Pop-Pop comes in, tracking mud on the carpet and getting yelled at before Grandma even lays eyes on the footprints. He’s got one big cardboard box stacked atop another. For a moment, he doesn’t seem old to me at all. His arms are still so strong. The moment he sets the boxes down, I reach in.
“Aspetta. Ashpetta! Ashpet, ashpet,” he warns and repeats, sliding between Italian and Italian-American while he lays out white paper plates. “Careful now, Nigole,” sticking a “g” in the middle of my name, as always. “Don’t squeeze. You’ll bruise them. Be gentle.”
Before long, we’ve covered the table and reinforced the Italian words for all the vegetables we usually call by another name. Piles of pomodori in every shade from green-gold to blood-red, crooked peperoncini, deep purple melanzane, fat wax beans (somehow only called fagioli once cooked), heaps of basilico e prezzemolo, deep emerald escarole, and finocchio with enormous fronds. We haven’t even emptied the box of what I know will be the sweetest sweet corn. And the garden, a surprisingly narrow strip running the length of our shared suburban house, is still giving more out the back window.
“Come ‘ere, dear,” he calls, “It’s a good summer. Not too dry. Just hot enough. And the salt got the slugs.” Grandma can’t hear him over the sizzling pan, running faucet, and Bob Barker. She steps through the threshold, carrying the scent of olive oil and garlic with her. Her eyes widen with a mix of awe and overwhelm. She glances back at the much smaller table behind her and sighs. I giggle, knowing it’s just as full.
“Come on down,” I tease, “you’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right!”
“Make bags for Marge. She’s coming by later. Estelle and John, too. A small box even, just to bring down to the Center” she says.
“I already handed some over the fence. You know, to what’s-his-name,” he half-replies.
“Buzz!” I chime, wondering why Pop-Pop won’t remember the name of the chain-smoking Vietnam Vet in cut-off shorts and tinted aviators who lives right behind us. He coached my first softball team.
“The beans grew right through. Been eating the ones on his side, Buzz, he has. Zucchini, too. Gotta sure up the fence though. Corn’s getting heavy. Don’t want him worrying. Gets nervous, Buzz. Buzz? Some kinda name that is.” Pop-pop went on, shaking his head.
“There’s plenty enough. For Buzz, for them all,” Grandma insists, waving away the conversation – and maybe the shadow of the Great Depression, when she learned that enough was never achieved alone.
Grandma gets closer, starts counting under her breath, weighing with her eyes. She’s already sweating, but the little breeze through the screen door seems to wick away what’s left of her resistance to being appreciative.
“Joey!!!!” she yells at the top of her lungs. “Get your father down here,” she says in my direction, pumping only slightly less volume, while walking back to the kitchen. “We need more wax paper. And I told him that we didn’t have so many of the good quart jars, so now I have no choice. I have to use his plastic, with the lids. Like we’re making Chinese soup.”
“They’re not home, remember? He’s in the city. Mom’s at the salon. You are watching us,” I remind, “Can I ask Buzz if Annie wants to play?”
“Well, then, you check on your sister. And see if she’ll snap beans with you,” she half-replies. “I need to know what Joey wants with this eggplant. A whole caponata? Or just with the peppers like we did last week.” she continues, at a more moderate volume, signaling that she’s now talking entirely to herself.
My little sister and I help for a while – ferrying full colanders from sink to table, slipping the skins off shocked tomatoes. But soon Lisa’s back in front of the television, watching the other Bob – Bob Ross – paint happy little trees with Pop-Pop. And I’ve put my nose back in a Babysitter Club book.
Long before a dent was made, we two were interrupting the busiest person in the house to ask about lunch.
“Abbastanza abbondanza. All this food! Plenty enough.” Grandma Rose cries, while shuffling to the mustard colored refrigerator and pulling out what she put up yesterday. Again, I can’t quite tell whether she’s feeling delighted or damned, relieved or frustrated. Not wanting to make her any more of whatever she was, I quickly spoon bean and fennel salad onto the heel of Italian bread leftover from breakfast. Going back for seconds, I hunt around for the soft but sharp pieces of asiago flecked with parsley, determined to get more of the cheese than Lisa. Admittedly, I was always slow to eat the marinated mushrooms and roasted red peppers, which felt too slick on my tongue. But even the foods I didn’t love taught me something: nothing was wasted. Everything found its place – on the table, in a jar, in someone else’s kitchen.
My mother pulls into the driveway the same time as Marge, a widow (or maybe a disguised divorcée), who, unlike the rest of the grandma’s friends, had a driver’s license of her own. The moment they walk in the door, I bring them right to the bounty in the next room. My mother, looking glamorous with her hair freshly cut and colored, smiles and politely picks up a few of the choicest slicers.
“Nothing like a Jersey tomato,” mom says, feigning and failing to match my level of enthusiasm. At that time, she preferred the upstairs pantry stocked from Grand Union: Snackwells devil’s food cookies (for weight loss!), oat-bran enriched pretzels (to fight cholesterol!), cheese in a can (convenient and cravable!) Her late 1980s favorites were all shelf-stable without any of the old skills that sucked up your summer.
Marge, though, comes in with her own basket, a big bunch of rosemary, and some store-bought eggs she’d bought with coupons. I watch and listen as she makes room in the packed fridge, picks some of the rosemary, and recounts a bocce game in great detail. Marge wasn’t half the cook my grandma was, but she minced garlic when asked, accepted the jars she was offered without hesitation. In fact, she expressed an encouraging amount of gratitude, imagining aloud about how she’d use the mushrooms and describing how her grandkids finished off the last jar of sours when they usually peel the pickles right off their Happy Meals. She even offered to bring that little box to the others the next day when she went to the (Senior) “Center”.
There was no awkwardness in the exchange. No talk of owing either – just the clean cultural choreography of people who’d lived through times when mutual provision wasn’t optional, it was survival. Tacitly trust that what went out would come back in another form. A ride to Marshalls. A batch of cookies. Time by a bedside when the apple-a-day just didn’t do the trick anymore. No, my grandmother wouldn’t make it to bingo that week, but Pop-pop’s sweet corn and chard would. And by late September, Rose and Joe might have time to ride the bus with the rest of them for a day of slots and blackjack in Atlantic City.
Provisioning was just what they did in August. My grandfather did not expect accolades for all the hours he spent turning and trellising. (Though the kind words made his eyebrows lift and his eyes twinkle.) My grandmother didn’t deliberate over whether she deserved the garden’s glut. (She just wondered where we’d fit it all.) And their garden didn’t ask who was worthy of its fruits. Gardens offer and then send all their energy to seed before dying back. And if conditions are conducive, they might voluntarily start the cycle again, without our intervention.
Joe harvested. Rose responded. The garden kept going.
Worthiness wasn’t a precondition.
It just showed up alongside the doing.
“My garden, I realize, is also a vessel. Still unfenced, it doesn’t offer much of a protective barrier, but the part we weed and prune is the top of something deep. A container for the aphanipoetic and the emergent (words my grandparents never would have read or uttered). It is made to nourish life and transform death. To hold not just food but a vision of the multi-species community I want to feed and be fed by.”
We pull out the provisioning paraphernalia. Cutting boards and colanders. Fermentation crocks. Various kinds of salt. A vacuum sealer, dehydrator, and plastic freezer bags. Twine and scissors.
Then I line up my jars, sorting the proper mason jars for canning from the ones I like best for big batches of refrigerator pickles and the salvaged sauce jars with labels half-peeled away that still need sterilizing. I consider the contours and capacity of all the repurposed honey and condiment jars, matching each to some improvised recipe starting to take shape as I survey the wider scene. The basil is still meager but the arugula went wild, so we’ll blitz up pesto with bitter greens and pack it into the little jars that once carried chili crisp. Those are low acid, so they’ll probably stay in the freezer. I check for cracks, the tiny chips that will unmake a seal or snap at the slightest freezer expansion. Seeing none, I get my younger son to play everyone’s least favorite game: match the lid! As he clangs around in the bottom drawer we can’t ever quite keep organized, we consider whether it’s time to make our favorite kimchi, but decide we’re better off eating these first few cabbages fresh, waiting for the rest to be ready, and then doing one big batch in the biggest crock. Plus, we’ve already got plenty enough to do today.
The right vessel matters. It has to hold, to protect, to carry flavor, sustenance, and safety into another season. My friend and fermentation mentor Mara King once told me that fermentation teaches you to ask, What’s the container? Not just the literal jar, but the whole environment you create for life to do its work. When making kvass or kraut, you don’t force the lactobacillus to do your bidding. You set up the right conditions and let them get on with it. In system shift, she says, it’s the same: less micromanaging, more tending the conditions for emergence. On the broadest scale, we’re all in one container – Earth – and things rot and stink when we fail to tend to the integrity of our very real terrarium.
My garden, I realize, is also a vessel. Still unfenced, it doesn’t offer much of a protective barrier, but the part we weed and prune is the top of something deep. A container for the aphanipoetic and the emergent (words my grandparents never would have read or uttered). It is made to nourish life and transform death. To hold not just food but a vision of the multi-species community I want to feed and be fed by.
Now, standing in my own kitchen in the thick heat of late summer, I cut and core, boil and brine, pound and pack, thinking about how generosity and discernment are twin arts. What to harvest, what to turn under, and what to turn over to the chickens. What to give fresh, what to save, what to transform into something that will last. What to store for my own family, and what to offer out into the world in faith that it will land in willing hands.
Steam from blanching kale fogs my glasses; I wipe them with the same dishtowel I’ve been using all afternoon, which smells of vinegar and overripe melon. Dill clings to my fingertips. My thumb cramps from hours of chopping. Somewhere in the living room, my older son shouts a question about dinner and a swim after. I realize I haven’t eaten anything other than tasting spoonfuls and scraps all day. Still, a dip in the pond sounds so much more appealing than dinner.
As the canner boils and fruit flies trace infinity symbols over the compost pail, I think about a near future already leaking into the present – when storms, shortages, or politics strip the shelves. We might feel it first in our kitchens, in the gap between what we want and what’s there. For some, the ethos of plenty enough will allow a smoother shift. For others, especially those used to excess, the abrupt change will feel like a loss they dare not say too loud.
Even then, will it be hard for some to appreciate produce and preserves they don’t prefer? We’ve been conditioned to link food with favorites, to expect eating to be easy. Or else we’ve been told to optimize our nutrition and satisfy our urges at most meals.
Will more people be able to accept a gift without flinching? We’ve been trained to think generosity is suspicious, that every offer hides an angle. But the garden keeps producing – at least some things each season – and the jars keep clamoring to be reused and re-filled.
I carefully clamp the jar-lifter around the wide mouth of the last pint and wait to hear the tell-tale ping, a sound that assures me we’ll have tomatillo salsa with roast squash in February. My hand, still holding a damp dishtowel, moves to the small of my back. I might not be wearing a house dress, but I’ve assumed Rose’s posture. I need to sit for a minute before tackling another round of dishes. Still, I smile at the gleaming jars and swaying bundles of medicinal herbs hanging from everything hitch-able or remotely hook-like.
Tomatillo salsa, kimchi, blau kraut – all of these would have tasted as unfamiliar on my grandmother’s tongue as the vocabulary I use when I try to guide folks back toward the wisdom she whisked into the meals that fed my father and then me. Call them traditional foods, if you like, but leave space to carry forward your own traditions and craft new ones. We don’t marinate mushrooms in this house, but we often grow our own and have plenty of ways to serve them for dinner with friends. Foodways can evolve so long as we hazard our hope on a garden and provision with discernment, generosity, and trust in enoughness.
Enough is plenty; plenty is enough.
