There they are. Five of them. And one must go. But how to choose? “Wide shoulders narrowing to a point”? “Ginormous”? “Elongated”? Or even harder to resist, “fruity redolence” and “thick juicy flesh.” If I’m limiting myself to just four, “smuggled here through the Iron Curtain more than forty years ago” is guaranteed the top spot.
It is seed season, and I’m bent over the catalog, debating which varieties to grow this year. My initial desire is to plant all the available peppers, to get a sense for their vegetation, to chart their blossoms and productivity. Peppers star in nearly all global cuisines, from the chili rellenos of Mexico to the pimientos de padrón of Spain. Cultivated across Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe, we can trace their origins to the South American continent where they held a place of honor in the culinary traditions of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. A member of the nightshade family along with tomatoes and potatoes, pepper range from munchingly sweet to eye-wateringly hot in a kaleidoscopic pageantry of colors and shapes, including “ginormous” and “elongated.”
Despite their nearly worldwide propagation and globetrotting ways, peppers do not thrive in Montana. Here, a greenhouse is usually required to provide the necessary heat units to ripen peppers, and with limited protected space, I must be strategic with my seed choices. I am committed to eating what I grow, and without being overly rigid in enforcement, I hope to consume only fruits and vegetables that I can sustain at the Patch or that I trade for or purchase locally. Eighteen kinds of hot pepper do not a year-round diet make.
In the past, I’ve approached each growing season with saturation as the goal, hoping that if I could get enough seedlings in the ground, a portion would survive the grasshoppers, the wind, or an early frost. But I’m rethinking that assumption these days. Montana is a harsh space at times, and the species that thrive here do so because they’ve adapted to an often-unforgiving climate. Many native plants have the capability to lie dormant until the erratic moisture arrives, or to survive dramatic temperature extremes, attributes that the alluring pepper does not have.
My pursuit of peppers highlights a dilemma in my Patch project. I want to be local in my sourcing, but I thrill to some plant species that grow comfortably only half a world away; I aim to embrace sustainable practices, but only insofar as I don’t count my car’s emissions on my work commute or the fossil fuel impact of all the materials that must be hauled in to build a greenhouse or keep the fences up.
Ironically, those of us attempting to live more sustainably face these sorts of contradictions, where living at all requires a never-ending series of less-than-optimal choices. In comparison to the global context where I have minimal impact, my pepper predicament can become a space of creative experimentation and generative resistance. I can’t halt the colonizing violence currently being enacted upon landscapes and people and waterways, but I can ponder my growing practices and challenge my own assumptions.
The standard approach – from industrial agriculture to small growers – is to plant rows and rows of garden vegetables and then harvest them all as they mature. Just such a method had me scratching my head over buckets of banana peppers last year, attempting to get creative with a massive harvest, lying awake at night dreaming up a variety of pepper preservation methods. The abundance of peppers was a grand thing, a joyful occurrence that I leaned into as I froze peppers, pickled peppers, dried peppers, and made pepper mead. Nonetheless, the pepper deluge revealed a flaw in my philosophy of growing – I often prioritize the size of the harvest over the nature of my participation.
If I were running a CSA or attempting to feed my entire community, the aim for maximum productivity might make sense. But I’m not. I grow food to feed myself and the small handful of loved ones with whom I share space. My interest in growing is part of a larger scheme – that of placing myself into relationship with plants, animals, weather, and sunshine, attempting to create a generative bubble where the ravages of capitalist extraction might be just a bit less dominant.
This growing season, I am shifting away from the maximum harvest model and experimenting with a mindset that assumes abundance while practicing presence. The change might not look all that different to the casual observer. I will still plant and tend and weed. But I’ll also see myself as part of a year-round cycle, a participant in the growing spaces with an eye to harvesting only what I need for sustenance, instead of aiming to get the most possible out of the soil. I might leave the overgrown mass of cilantro in place to shelter the spiders it currently hosts instead of ripping it out and replanting. I might let some of the radish reach ridiculous size, just to smile at the pigs as they ecstatically crunch into what I saw in the past as overgrown waste. It is possible that I’ll harvest far fewer peas than is optimal, or that the kale might underperform. If so, I’ll adjust my wants and consider making peace with less.
I’m not promulgating some sort of wilderness ideal – left on its own, the Patch would swiftly return to a windswept expanse of gravel. Instead, I’m trying to wrap my mind around a practice of partnering with life and growth and fecundity without falling into the mindset of commodification, mass consumption, or control. I want to exist in a landscape where humans adapt instead of dominate. A cottonwood sprout just emerged smack in the middle of the vegetable bed? While not ideal for my gardening plans, that is likely a good place for it, especially in this treeless landscape. I’ll hold my hoe in check. The pigs can’t place an order for feed – I’ll do that. The greenhouse vegetables depend on water – time to haul the hose. In the winter when the geese balk at walking in the winter snow? I’ll adjust and move them to a space where they can go in and out of shelter without traversing drifts. I have an important role to play, to orchestrate but not dictate. The goal is to reduce the number of unilateral decisions I make, to embrace a cooperative method that takes me out of the top spot. While humans followed just such a practice throughout nearly all of history, it isn’t something we encounter often in mainstream culture.
I will grow peppers, and I’m excited to see their “bold spark” in the greenhouse, even as I am confident they will make my “taste buds tingle all over.” There’s no doubt they will be “irresistibly appealing,” but I’ll work with them as partners and not products, and certainly not as vegetal poundage to be amassed. I will harvest a reasonable amount, enough to enjoy and some to preserve for the colder months. But I will resist the urge to plant to excess, especially since I’ve exhausted all my creative preserving methods, and pigs don’t like peppers.
Descriptive pepper quotations are from the Fedco seed catalog, which can be found at https://www.fedcoseeds.com/about.
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