Potatoes + Emotions
What farming is teaching me about our emotional landscape
Hi Friends!
We’re here. For the first-ever Sunday Stories email! We’re doing the dang thing!
Thanks so much for joining me. I’m overjoyed to be writing to you today.
I also know it’s been a rough week and it feels like so much has happened since I announced Sunday Stories this past Monday. How are you holding up?
For me, grief is overshadowing my joy and excitement. I had grand thoughts about launching this newsletter in a flurry of positivity and wise insights, to give you an escape from current events even if just for 10 or 15 minutes. But, our world upended itself on Friday, as it so often does these days.
RBG’s passing is heartbreaking. Even though I never knew her, it is a loss I feel deep in my bones. It seems like many of us do. The immediate, dogged determination of Senate Republicans in the US to fill her Supreme Court vacancy before the November election is pouring salt in a fresh, open wound. Even though I’ve learned not to expect decency or compassion from a large swath of politicians, I still can’t wrap my head around why. Why are people so cruel? How can they ignore the humanity of other people?
My heart almost always hurts for a pain being experienced somewhere in the world, and the pain has been compounded to almost unbearable levels this year. At times, it feels like I am taking on so much pain from the world that I will burst, a cell so full of water that it explodes. It is incomprehensible to me that other people don’t feel even a portion of this pain. Or perhaps they have elected to turn it off. How? How have they divorced themselves from those nerve endings?
I don’t know if there are answers to those questions. I certainly don’t understand it, and I don’t know if I ever will. This anguish over people’s lack of humanity adds to the pain I carry.
I know you’re carrying pain too. This year, this pandemic, has impacted every single one of us. Sometimes, I wonder how much trauma we’re all accumulating this year, and when we’ll be able to begin to process it. For now, it feels like we’re just surviving. The trauma is getting buried, to resurface later.
And that, thinking about buried things, brings me to this week’s letter. Let’s dive in.
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My weekly routine here on the farm looks something like this:
Tuesday—Farming tasks like weeding, planting, and maintenance
Wednesday—Morning farming, afternoon harvest (we harvest basil ONE LEAF at a time and it takes hours to accumulate just 1.5 pounds)
Thursday—Harvest, harvest, harvest (this is when we harvest most of the food for the 3x farmer’s markets the farm participates in each weekend, and it’s always a long busy day)
Friday—Quiet solo farming while other folks are at a farmer’s market
Saturday—Small harvest and wrapping up farming tasks that didn’t get done during the week
Sunday and Monday—Rest
Throughout the season, projects and produce have come in pulses. In July, it was stringing tomatoes. In August, the tomatoes we’d worked hard to prepare were at their peak. We harvested at least 100 pounds of tomatoes every two days. Now, as the temperatures dip into the 40s at night and the 90-degree heat has finally broken, we’re transitioning into fall. Winter squash, gourds, and pumpkins are abundant. Things that grow below ground, like onions and scallions and potatoes, are shyly stepping into the limelight. And so, most mornings when we aren’t harvesting, we dig potatoes.
I’ve spent hours with these potatoes, running my hands through the dirt in search of the pink and purple and yellow tubers hidden within. It’s nature’s Easter Egg hunt. And early this week, as I carefully placed my shovel and broke the soil and sifted handfuls of dirt, it struck me that potatoes are like our emotions, our past experiences, our trauma—hidden in the earth, waiting.
It’s a metaphor that stuck with me all week. Through the long hours, the parallels deepened. And even though I envisioned starting this newsletter with grand stories of big adventures to transport us all while we’re stuck at home or inside, I felt a magnetic pull towards this story. Even though potatoes seemed silly and mundane to my inner critic—literally small potatoes—it also feels important. It feels revolutionary in its simplicity, its clarity.
Red potatoes, bright pink after freshly being dug. Photo credit: groworganic.com
Since most of us aren’t farmers and this knowledge isn’t passed down through the generations anymore, here’s some background:
Potatoes grow underground. Depending on the variety and the conditions, they may grow a few inches down or right on the surface. They may spread out in an eight-inch radius around the plant, or they may stay in a tight nest directly under the top growth. Like our feelings about a certain experience, which may stay tightly balled up or stretch out luxuriously.
As the farm season progressed, we weeded the potato plants a few times to make sure they didn’t get overtaken by bindweed or thistle or sunflowers. Once we weeded, we mulched the potatoes with thick flakes of straw and hay. We went through dozens of bales, making sure each plant was snug in a straw bed, the blanket tucked tightly around the plant’s base where it emerges from the ground. In thinner spots, we did this again, a few weeks later.
We do this too, as humans. We layer straw and protection over our painful or shameful experiences. We try to protect ourselves, to put a protective blanket between us and the world.
Potatoes, like so many of us, have the urge to rise upwards, towards the light. If left to their own devices, they would crown out of the soil and soak up sunlight on the surface. The mulch we tucked around the plants protects the growing potatoes and prevents any green spots. The greening comes with light exposure. It’s also poisonous to humans, so don’t eat a green potato—or at the very least cut off the spots if they’re small!
As the potatoes reach ripeness, the leaves shrivel up and turn brown as the above-ground part of the plant dies back. The plant knows that its growing job is done, and so it relinquishes itself to what’s underneath.
And this, finally, is when we harvest.
The potato plant life cycle. Image credit: Shutterstock
To harvest, we gently peel back all the straw and hay we mounded around the plants months earlier. We peel back the protective layer and sometimes, like with our emotions, we find potatoes right on the surface, ready to be gently brushed off, inspected for nicks or scrapes, and scooped up with our hands.
To dig a bit deeper into the soil, I carefully place a shovel a few inches past where I think the furthest potato is. Like we do with ourselves and others, we tentatively probe the shovel into the unknown.
Usually, the meer fracturing of dirt layers on the shovel blade reveals a few potatoes. It reminds me of when we dig into our own experiences or those of people close to us, ask questions about the past, and are offered a few nuggets. Softly, I pluck those potatoes out and put them in a tub, to be washed and cared for later. Then, I sift through the shovelful of dirt, layer by layer, trying to make sure no potatoes remain.
There is an art to bringing the shovel up out of the ground, gently rocking it back with a mound of dirt on the blade. The trick is to leave the blade partially in the ground, to not force a sudden exposure all at once. In front of the shovel, in the wall of underground dirt it has just revealed, there are often a few potatoes jutting out. Quickly removing the shovel, like if we were truly digging a big hole, would nick those potatoes and damage them. Instead, I gently excavate the dirt above those potatoes. If I can’t get them out with a careful pry or the dirt is too compact, I readjust my shovel placement, slightly closer to the root of the issue, and dig again.
Eventually, I’ve dug all around the plant and even dug the plant itself, pulling it and its roots out of the ground. A few tiny potatoes cling to the roots, the size of a marble or a pea, or even smaller. Tiny grains that might grow into an emotional pearl. No matter how tiny they are, I try to remove them and add them to the bin. If left behind, they can grow and sprout again next year.
Sometimes, no matter how careful I try to be, I slice through a potato. Like when we probe into a friend’s or partner’s or family member’s past with the best of intentions—we’re curious and just want to get to know them more—only to find we’ve accidentally struck a nerve. Or sometimes we do this to ourselves, unintentionally. We suddenly find ourselves digging through the dirt inside us, unsure why an experience or someone’s words were so triggering.
Usually, I’ll find one half of the potato in the dirt and have to go searching for the other piece. More than once, it’s been stuck to the back of the shovel. I only find it after going through all the dirt around me, searching and searching, then realizing it’s been there all along.
And lately, as we’ve been working against the next frost that’s sure to come in a few weeks, we’ve been digging potatoes out of the ground a little early. They’re ready but they haven’t had time to cure. Their skin is baby soft and tender. My fingernails have accidentally scraped more than a few potatoes as I tried to pry them out of the dirt. It reveals their white flesh underneath and demands more immediate tending, since damaged potatoes won’t hold through the winter. And don’t we do this too, to the ones around us? We lift up a little nugget we’re excited to have found, only to realize that we’ve accidentally hurt them, that they need some tender loving care from us.
Of course, no matter how hard we try, some potatoes will get left behind. They stay hidden in the dirt, hibernating through the winter, only to sprout into “volunteer” potatoes next year, whatever is planted in that field be damned. Which is exactly how some of our emotions and trauma work. Despite our best efforts to unearth them, to compassionately examine an experience and not let it fester, some of its seedlings will stay hidden and show up as full-grown potato plants years down the line.
And so this whole process will begin again, carefully peeling back the layers, carefully digging, carefully excavating, all so careful and hopeful, sometimes rewarding us with beautiful big fruit, and sometimes revealing a cut-in-half potato we must remedy.
Next year or the year after or a decade from now, some of our potatoes from 2020 will show up. I don’t think there’s anything we can do to prevent this, or even anything wrong with this. It’s just how we are. We’re human. It seems like the best way forward is simply to tread carefully, trying not to step on our own baby potatoes or those around us, to dig gently, and to excavate compassionately.
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Thanks so much for reading this week, and for being part of our founding group of Sunday Stories members!
Let me know how you’re doing—truly, I want to know—and what you think. Did this email resonate with you? Do you have some potatoes in your own life? Simply reply to this email and I’ll get your message. I’m here.
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