Letting Go of Garden Losses

Maybe next year I'll follow my own advice. I gave it to myself last year, but apparently I wasn't listening.

Last year I swore I would not plant any gourds - no squash, melon, or pumpkins. The squirrels eat all of them. No matter what. I wrap them in bird netting and cover them with blood meal (or menstrual blood, but this year all that is nourishing my babe - don't mean to gross anyone out, just telling it like it is). I can't spritz them with pepper spray because I fear it would get into my child's eyes and mouth.

I also told myself not to plant corn. Takes up tons of space, uses lots of water, and fertilization is spotty.

Much of my garden right now is squirrel-ravaged gourds and short, spotty corn. Also green tomatoes that are just thinking about turning red. Maybe. Tiny carrots and beets that don't seem to want to get bigger. A teensy patch of fall spinach in the middle of a bed I over planted with seeds that never germinated, or maybe got scratched by chickens.

The garden actually looks pretty good because all those squash and pumpkin plants have huge, vibrant leaves. With sunflowers (minus the actual flower) poking up in their midst. And corn that looks like it's getting somewhere. And huge bushy cherry tomato plants. Dotted with lots of little green orbs. But we're not eating much out of the patches right now. Oh well.

Being 35 weeks pregnant gives one a certain dose of accepting reality. The garden is what it is. We've had lots of lettuce, the carrots and beets and chard may be smallish but are yummy. The tomatoes will ripen, or in early September I'll make green tomato soups. The squash plants get added to the compost (probably why I have so many squash plant volunteers this year - last year's squirrel food!).

And next year I am planting only the things my family eats and squirrels don't, like green beans, tomatoes, and more carrots. Maybe. I'll let you know if I actually manage to follow my own advice to myself. By then I'll have a four year old and a baby starting to crawl. In addition to chickens and squirrels. Hmm.

Summer Heat in the Garden

This is, ironically, the hardest time of year for me as a gardener: high summer. Partly because it's just so freaking hot here in eastern Colorado, but also because all there is to do is weed. And fertilize. And clean up after the chickens and heavy rains. No planting (though soon I will put in fall crops like broccoli and kale and parsnip). No planning (besides thinking about all the strawberry plants I want to add next year...). Very little harvesting as we are between the cool and warm season harvest - we still have lots of lettuce and a few carrots, but mostly it's wait for the baby pumpkins and tomatoes to ripen.

The heat makes me whiny.

This year my garden is doing far better than the last two years. I used a ton of compost to amend the soil last spring, I fertilized my plants with organic veggie fertilizer (I've been something of a fertilizer snob in the past, wanting compost to be enough, but in my leached soil it just isn't), and we've had a lot more rain. So I really have nothing to complain about. I'm just impatient for action. And cooler temperatures.

Interestingly, about the time of the harvest, I'll be harvesting a pretty sacred fruit from another of my gardens, my family: My baby is due September 15th. So again the veggie garden and the life garden align: we enter the horse latitudes, the dog days of summer, ripening, waiting, and dreaming of cool sweetness with the fruits of my patience and love.

I wish you peace and lemonade this summer, dear reader! I'd love to hear how you are spending your long summer days in the gardens of your life.

Cultivating Persistence and Faith in the Garden

Gardening is all about letting go and letting the Powers That Be run the show. I am reminded of my preschool-age daughter, who is learning to play with other children. The challenge for her is letting go of being in control; when she plays with me or Daddy, she can tell us what to say and direct the show. Not so much with other kids. Gardening is exactly like this: we are co-creators of the garden, playing with the devas, the weather, the Goddess, the plants. Sometimes this can be frustrating, as when hail or squirrels or who-knows-what destroys the pumpkin seedlings. But then in another corner of the garden some of the tomatoes you grew from seed will be flourishing, partly because you doted on them (just as you did the pumpkins) and partly because of invisible forces supporting your gardening dreams.

Maybe that balance between frustration and joy is part of why we garden. Certainly these feelings mirror most of life, from learning to play with others to facing life's greatest stressors. Lately I've been facing a lot of invitations to cultivating deeper faith: I'm pregnant, we had to incur more debt to care for our house, we're in the process of buying a used car, and of course, my garden grows as it grows. Through all of these experiences I continually have to let go and trust, while simulataneously keeping to my path. I have to cultivate both faith and persistence. I have to keep watering and fertilizing and weeding (and paying credit card bills and visiting used car lots and taking my prenatal vitamins), while letting go and letting Nature or God do Her thing. Requires lots of deep breathing.

One reason I want to spread the word about the power of gardening to change the world and change ourselves is that I think the lessons of the garden, like persistence and faith, can be applied on a much larger scale in a profoundly positive way. Practically speaking, this can mean changing the way our economy is structured through local food, bartering, eating in season and other garden-centric practices. Emotionally and spiritually a garden-centric way of life might mean even greater shifts. What would happen, for instance, if we all honored the dirt in our back yards and in our neighbors' yards? What would the world be like if we celebrated the harvest not as a historically questionable holiday in winter but as a real-life go-pick-the-corn-as-a-community in July or August? How might our foreign policies be informed if everyone in the United States, Mexico, Iraq and Somalia had a garden plot that they tended and we understood as individuals and a culture what that meant to people on the other side of the planet?

The garden can be a deeply powerful tool for change in your life, your community, and the world. I have faith that this positive change will continue to grow as garden plots and garden-centric thinking spreads in our culture. I hope as you cultivate and weed, water and feed, that you will feel inspired to offer up prayers to a world of faith through gardening. And... I hope the squirrels stay away from your melons.

New Life: Early Spring and Inner Stirrings

I've a stow away growing inside, a thirteen-week-old fetus who already has a name and for whom we looked at bunkbeds today. As humans we plan. We get caught up (I get caught up) in the next few years, living in this house with two small children, with a bunkbed and a single income (not mine) and thoughts of schooling and college funds and all-important middle names.

Meanwhile, in the garden the garlic my daughter and I planted last fall is three inches tall, erect and proud and bright green. Daffodils and tulips have taken courage from the garlic sprouts, and are also a couple inches tall, braving the still freezing nights. It's been warm during the day, so I who sleep in a heated and insulated house at night find it hard to believe more hasn't sprouted - and yet I am also held to the truth of time and natural unfolding by the plants' tentative gestures. All in good time.

I think of my babe like one of the pea seeds I planted at the end of February as soon as the soil could be worked (a tease in Colorado, since we can still have several hard freezes). I wanted to peek, so I dug up one of the seeds and YES! it has germinated, just a teeny bit. Though it still may very well freeze and not sprout.

In a few weeks I will probably peek at my baby with an ultrasound, too. Oh, how I long to probe the secrets of the world and peek beneath the soil... but: the pea is not ready to sprout. I tucked it back beneath the composty soil, and I give thanks my little fetus is safe in my womb, undisturbed. All in good time.

Such are the lessons of patience, faith, and waiting for all good things to pass. February and March are impatient times for me. So too is the first trimester of pregnancy. But I'm learning, slowly. The Goddess offers much to gently remind me that all in good time will things flourish and bloom. Maybe some year I won't put out seeds a month early. At least it's not tomatoes, like I planted three months early my first spring here... and again several springs later. Oh, do I get restless. Trust. I need to learn some trust and faith and patience. It's a good thing babies come exactly when they are supposed to.

May your garden and your health be blessed this early spring.