Harvesting Arugula Seeds
I have had little time for writing lately, or even much interest in it. I am busy in the world, trying my best to do the things I write about and live an intentional life full of practice. Any gardener or farmer will be able to tell you what life looks like from May through October. Early spring was a flurry of activity this year. I’m growing more than 3,000 square feet of food across four different gardens. By the time the summer heat arrives, the plants have filled in enough that you can stop worrying quite so much about weeding. This growing season has also been unique in Ontario. We haven’t had any long periods of drought, and for that I’m grateful.
If you follow me on Instagram, you might know from my stories that I’m currently drowning in zucchini. I have something like twelve zucchini plants, and this year has been a bumper crop. I would estimate that I’ve processed a dozen, have another dozen sitting on my shelf, and have probably given away twice that many. Nothing teaches abundance quite like zucchini.
A few weeks ago, I let all my lettuce go to seed. I’d been harvesting from it regularly, and it was getting a bit too big. I’ve got a few different varieties growing, and this year my favourite by far was the arugula. I planted it in my backyard garden and would sneak out to grab a handful of leaves to add a punch of flavour to any salad. It was my first year growing it, and I’m excited to add it to my regular lineup.
This week I decided to pull the arugula plants. Some were dying, and all the seed pods were looking very ripe. Arugula seeds grow in pods, kind of like miniature pea pods. There are anywhere from five to twenty small seeds per pod, and it’s best to let them dry on the plant before harvesting. My handful of ten or so plants produced more than enough seed to last me the next few years. Another true lesson in abundance.
This afternoon I decided it was a good time to snip the pods from the plants and bring them inside to finish drying before storing them for next spring. On a whim, I also scattered a few seeds back into the same bed I had just cleared. Maybe I’ll get another harvest before the cold weather sets in. Maybe not. I’ve never tried this with arugula before, but I’m hopeful.
Harvesting arugula seeds is good, slow work. The best kind, really. On a nice day, like today, the work is both enjoyable and meaningful. It’s hands-on work that helps me connect with a new plant; hopeful work that has me thinking about next season; skillful work that teaches me how to handle the seeds, dry them, store them, and, in doing so, create one small piece of what local food resilience might look like.
I think a lot about this type of slow work and what it means. It’s intentionally inefficient in a social landscape that frowns on wastefulness and demands productivity. It moves at the pace of my often-strained nervous system, much like hanging laundry on the line or walking to the grocery store. I approach slow work as a personal practice, a kind of meditation where I can deliberately move with mindful inefficiency as both a form of protest and a form of healing.
Because really, slow work is more than just a rejection of capitalist efficiency. Every time we use technology to make a process more efficient, there are small losses that we rarely consider: skills that slowly disappear over time. Seed saving knowledge is a perfect example.
When I was building websites professionally in the mid-2000s, I worked at a web design shop as a front-end developer and designer. It was an era of hand-coding. There weren’t the multitude of languages and libraries that exist today, and I remember spending a great deal of time teaching my hands specific keystrokes as I slowly built the muscle memory to type the same elements over and over again. One of the more experienced back-end developers once commented that I could save a lot of time by copying and pasting instead of typing the same lines repeatedly. I replied that if I had made a mistake in my code, I’d simply be repeating that too.
Over the years, my typing speed has carried me through many jobs with ease. Being able to type quickly is almost universally advantageous at this point, and I credit that speed to those early days of building muscle memory.
Maybe it’s not the best analogy, since it’s technology-based after all, but I do think it’s a small example of forgetting what is lost when we find a more efficient solution. Copy and paste leads to autocorrect, which leads to predictive text. At this point, we barely need to think about how to respond to emails or messages anymore. AI happily suggests responses for us. Sometimes that technology is genuinely useful, and sometimes I think we use it in ways that diminish us. I’m not here to make blanket statements about technology. I’m here to ask whether we’ve really considered all the ways it might shape our personal and collective well-being over the long run.
I have plenty of examples of how intentionally slow and inefficient work has made my own life better. Active transportation is one of them. I think our bodies are meant to move through the world under their own power, at least some of the time and as much as we can muster. Physiologically, there is an impact to constantly travelling at 50 km/h or more from one climate-controlled space to another. Our bodies like movement, especially movement at a human pace, where we can process the world around us and learn through observation. When was the last time you spent more than five minutes simply observing the natural world?
By contrast, transportation technology allows us to do some truly extraordinary things. My son just flew across North America to the west coast for a summer camp. I regularly drive across town to pick up things from Facebook Marketplace. When our bodies aren’t fully able to move on their own, cars, buses, planes, trains, and taxis help us stay connected with the people and places that matter. There are enormous benefits to these tools.
The question I also want to ask is: What might be lost?
I don’t think our culture gives that question enough room. We tend to celebrate efficiency without spending much time considering what it quietly asks us to give up.
For me, slowing down and embracing slow work whenever possible has been immensely rewarding. I’ll say it again: my nervous system needs slow work. It has become a time to disconnect, a time to notice, and a quiet act of rebellion against the constant cultural pressure for speed and efficiency. It has become a form of meditation, a way of building skills, and a practice of paying attention.