What the Garden Taught Me
The first harvest is not the big one. It is the one that tells you whether there will be a big one. That turns out to matter.
At Ostara I planted, as the Hearth does, one thing to watch through the year. Most people choose something sensible. Ash grows a sunflower every year, enormous and smug. Rowan grows herbs, which is cheating because they always work. I chose a bed of climbing beans, because I had a wall and a romantic idea and a packet of seed with a picture on the front of a woman in a hat holding a basket that could have fed a monastery.
I also, more quietly, sowed a half-row of oats in the corner, because they are Brighid's grain and because I wanted to be able to say I had grown the Lughnasadh loaf. I did not expect them to do anything. I have grown oats before. They are a crop for a field, not a corner, and they know it.
What happened
The beans came up beautifully and then stopped. A late frost at the end of April took the first lot; I resowed. The second lot came up, climbed about a hand's width, and were eaten overnight by something I never saw. The third lot, sown in June in a spirit of pure stubbornness, climbed the wall, flowered gloriously, scarlet, like something out of the seed packet, and set exactly eleven pods. I have counted them several times in case I missed one.
The oats, in the corner, where I had not weeded or watered or so much as looked at them, grew. Not tall, not thick, nothing a farmer would have recognised as a crop. But they headed, and the heads filled, and in the last week of July they went that particular pale gold that oats go, and rattled when the wind came through. I cut them with the boline, which is the first time I have ever used it for the purpose it is actually for, and rubbed the grain out between my palms into a bowl, and got about two cupfuls, and sat on the back step and cried a bit, which is becoming a theme in these journals and I am not going to apologise for it.
The loaf
The Lughnasadh loaf this year was mostly oats. I ground mine in a coffee grinder and it made about a third of a cup of rough flour, which I mixed with proper oat flour and a little wheat so that the thing would hold together. It was shaped like a sheaf, badly. It rose, because I have made enough bread to know how to make bread rise even when the flour is fighting me. It was broken in circle and shared with the words we always use, and everyone said it was good, and it was actually good, dense and nutty and a little sweet, and that is the most ordinary possible magic and I am going to tell you why it undid me.
What the first harvest is for
I had always understood Lughnasadh as a festival of abundance. The pictures are of sheaves and plenty. The woman in the hat. But that is Mabon's job, the second harvest, the groaning table. Lughnasadh is earlier and thinner. It is the first cutting, when most of the field is still green and you take in the little that is ready because you need to know: is it going to be all right? Is there going to be enough? The first loaf is not a celebration of plenty. It is a test of the year. You bake it from the first grain and you eat it and you find out whether the harvest is real.
My beans told me the harvest was not real. Eleven pods. If I had been feeding a family off that wall we would have been in trouble by Mabon. And that is information. That is what the first fruits are for: to tell you, early enough to do something about it, that the thing you planned is not going to work and you need another plan. I need to put netting over the beans next year, or not grow beans at all, or grow them somewhere the thing that eats them cannot get at them. I have until Ostara to decide. That is the gift.
And the oats told me the other half of the lesson, which is that the harvest you get is not always the one you planted for. I planted beans as a spell for abundance and got oats as a spell for patience. Brighid's grain, in Brighid's corner, grown by neglect, which is to say by trust. I did not help them. I could not have helped them. They did not need me. I needed them, to teach me what I could not have learned from the beans if the beans had worked.
The sacrifice
In the Lughnasadh circle we name what we are ready to cut down so that something else may be fed. This year I named my idea of myself as a person who can make anything grow by wanting it enough. It went into the fire with everyone else's paper. It burned about as well as you would expect; there was a lot of it.
What is left is a bowl with a handful of oat grains in it that I kept back for seed, and eleven bean pods drying on the windowsill, also for seed, because stubbornness is a virtue in a gardener and I am not giving up on the wall. And a loaf that was mostly oats, which is gone, because we ate it, because that is what it was for.
Wren keeps the Hearth's library and the fourth night of the flame, and has already ordered netting.