by Blake Davis

Currently listening to: Before Spring Ends by WangOK

What work is happening when nothing appears to be growing?

Observations: Visible and Invisible Work

I started this article in Western Africa where we set up in an Airbnb with my in-laws to recover from a week of managing five young children through multiple family wedding events in Dakar.

Reclining in 82 degree weather, surrounded by the noise of colorful birds, mosques giving calls to prayer, and the breeze blowing in mango trees around me, is a needed pause before traveling homeward.

Every day we’ve stayed here, a man comes to water the garden. I watch him
water, weed and caretake while I sip my coffee and try not to wake the baby across me like a weighted blanket.

While January in West Africa has growth that is constant and benefits from tending, tomorrow I fly back to my Tennessee garden, where it’s cold and quiet and seems lifeless on the surface (well, I did get a security camera notification of a skunk walking my driveway, so life persists in dormancy).

The work here is obvious, while back home, the most important work looks like… nothing at all.

Permission for Dormancy

I’ve always had an overactive need to appear productive, to improve, and to produce. Almost never from a healthy place.

Growing up with chronic health issues, I spent more than your average time in hospitals, and as strange as it sounds, I always had a small sense of relief during those seasons. They were the only times I fully permitted myself to silence the inner voice of “Shouldn’t I be doing…”

With growth and counseling, I now see I was the only one enforcing those expectations. But the relief at the time was real. And those times of complete rest were some of the most reflective and pivotal moments for redirection, clarity of thought, and the shaping of ideas for what came next.

January has become that same place of permission in the garden (without needing prescribed recovery).

I’m not expecting growth or production, and I don’t fault my garden (or myself) for resting.

Cold Stratification

Cold stratification gave language to what January is teaching me.

This is my second year practicing winter-sowing in milk jugs. It’s one of my favorite seeding methods because it’s ugly, it repurposes distilled water jugs (reducing my sense of waste), and the required dormancy needs nothing from me.

This is the most effective way I’ve found to start native seeds, as many have a physiological dormancy that can only be unlocked by prolonged cold, moist conditions. Setting them outside in milk jugs allows them to do this in a controlled environment– like little recycled dairy greenhouses where it LOOKS like nothing is happening on the outside.

So I get to just set them outside as early as November and forget about them until spring.

Even though we’re both resting this month, they are undergoing the process of cold stratification, a resting freeze-thaw cycle that triggers germination only when the time is right.

Five Years Out

I can’t help but apply these ideas to time.

Every December, my wife and I sit down together to orient ourselves to the following year. This usually starts with the question: What do we want our lives to be in five years?

Not achievements or stretch goals… but how we want to feel. What do we want our days to hold? What kind of atmosphere do we want to live inside?

From there, we work backwards, shaping the next 12 months of goals around that long-view.

I’ve heard that a garden looks new and young for two years, feels established after three, and and by year five, you can’t really tell how old it is. I’m in year three of my garden now.

When I moved here I was entering year three at my old house. So I’m enjoying seeing the grow towards a year five at last.

When I imagine that year, I envision it buzzing with life. Bees. Birds. Wildlife. Walking paths where I can pace and think through hard problems. Places to sit enclosed by green. An abundance of flowers, berries, and food to give away.

A garden where, nine months out of the year, anyone who visits can leave with something grown here.

By year five I would like my life, and my garden, to feel more like those native seedlings sitting in jugs outside: less frantic, more settled, peacefully present in their slow, dormant stratification.

Blind Spots and Blank Spaces

This way of thinking is changing how I approach decisions, too.

To better address stress in my work life, I hired a coach. I assumed they would start with tools like efficiency hacks and productivity systems to help me manage my one-five years goals.

Instead, he started by asking questions:

Why is this thing important?

What would fail if you stopped doing that?

Who would fault you for saying ‘no’ to that after hours meeting?

It challenged me. And like all lessons, I carry it back to the garden– not thinking about goals, but direction and permission.

Like the walkway leading to our house that I’ve never loved. I tried to incorporate elements to work around the existing chickweed and random shrubs that came with the property, but the constant weeds and lackluster appearance display my lack of inspiration. I never truly made it mine.

Now I’m asking: Does this even need to be a bed?

What would happen if I just tore everything out and left it empty? Who am I trying to impress?

A blank canvas feels better to me than something half-hearted and frustrating that I’ve fit into someone else’s foundation.

Not every space of my garden (and life) needs to be optimized, beautified or explained.

A Breath Before Spring

January offers the blank space to walk my garden while my winter-sown seeds quietly stratify, and the absence of leaves reveals the corners I often don’t see so I can look at the spaces and note what brings joy, and recognize what feels forced. To ask why I’m even trying to produce something that might simply need to rest.

Before the chaos of spring arrives, January invites me to pause, take stock, and ask better questions.

Not What can I do?

But What do I want this to become?

The same way seeds don’t need constant interference, some parts of my life don’t need constant improvement projects.

I can freeze and thaw, trusting that rest is not wasted time– it sets the condition to make growth possible.

A January Reflection for Gardeners

If you’d like to join me in the examination, take some time this month to sit with these questions:

• What do you want your garden to feel like in five years?
• What do you want your life to feel like?
• What worked last year, and what are you ready to let go of (without calling it failure)?
• Where are you tending something out of obligation rather than joy?
• What could you clear, simplify, or leave blank for now?
• What areas make you feel tired and what areas make you feel energized?
• What would you like to do with that extra capacity?

Sidebar: How to winter-sow in jugs

For anyone who wants to try this themselves, here’s a simple tutorial:

1. Take an empty milk or distilled water jug and remove the cap (clear is best, but I’ve had success with the opaque [Costco milk jug] type as well, it just lets less light in)
2. Cut it horizontally on a line below the handle leaving a 2-5 inch piece still attached that you can use as a hinge (I find it best to cut it so that the ‘hinge’ stays under the handle, otherwise when you lift the jug by the handle it puts the pressure on the seam instead of the ‘hinge’)
3. Poke holes in the bottom of the jug (it doesn’t take many, just enough so that water doesn’t pool in the bottom too long after a good rain. I went a little overkill in the one in this image)
4. Put about 2 inches of seeding mix soil into the jug. If you want to save a little cash you can put 1ish inch of native soil or potting mix with 1 inch of seed starting mix on top (I make my own seed starting mix with 2-3 parts peat moss and 1 part perlite, mixed well and wet)
5.  Place your seedlings that require cold-stratification into the seed starting mix
6. Close the jug and put some duct tape around the seam to keep it closed
7. VERY IMPORTANT: Write the name of the seedlings with a UV-resistant marker. Trust me… even if you’re confident you’ll remember, label it anyway.
8. Set them in the yard somewhere they face the elements. You want them to get rained on, snowed on, moisture and light (just not scorching sun)
9. That’s it! Check back when spring is coming (check your seed requirements, some require 30 days cold stratification, some require 60 or more. Most of my native seeds are from Prairie Moon and they have very helpful germination code information for each seed)