There is never enough time for everything, even when time is all you have; so make time for what you can. Prioritize as you see.
There’s much to do, but first I breathe. I look, assess—how to be most efficient—and then I waste time.
I waste time in the garden, as some might say and see; but it’s essential for balancing of mind and place and order of world. It’s gotten away from me—the garden (take what you will in allusion to rest).
Trying to help, I’ve harmed some. Neglecting, weeds have overtaken. Before I can weed, I must first cut them low with sickle to see where it is I am to work.
The onions are flowered. They will get no larger, and it is in protecting them that the roots took sanctuary and beginnings.
I pull the bulbs. As is often the case when all seems lost—they are better than I believed. There are enough to last a few months at the rate and way we eat.
I begin to weed. I don’t have a fixed method. I start with a shovel, cutting roots with blade of spade, but I don’t overturn. I’m not looking to make bare earth to dry out fast now that summer’s arrived. Next, I hoe: chopping and sizing topside growth but doing little to the roots beneath. Maybe I’ll stunt them, knock them back and come around again in a few days to suppress them once again. Maybe that’s all you can do in a garden grown naturally, where there will forever be a weed presence, and even if you eliminated the entire seedbank, a pretty bird would drop new seed in resting on stalk or vine.
Maybe that’s life and all the things that sneak into the good, robbing of their resources and the fruit we’re meant to bare—vigilance; just keeping at it.
Life is philosophy—religion, theosophy?—more than existence and meaningless motion. It’s the purpose and intent we put into it. Vigilance, I weed my mess.
I’m sweating. The weeds are harassed, suppressed like an enemy under machine gun fire—alive, but very much aware to the change of their security and precarious condition; they keep their heads low.
Already, bean row in the mess looks better. I can row it again. I see their white blooms starting, two weeks old and already seeking to set beans and pods.
First tomatoes are set on earliest vines. The rest are coming on. I grow from seed, just because, no good reason other than I like the sentiment of cultivating bounty from seed and through entirety of its season; though the trees from seed outlive us (or so I pray they do).
I make a new watering system for our chickens—two birds, three legs (cat or raccoon on one through coop- floor in the night source for the discrepancy; something’s always hunting you). They need a new coop, more secure and better designed to keep them off the ground, safe from predators, space to roost: another project, but today is the garden.
I seed a section I’ve let grow tall and thick with oats and peas and hairy vetch. My garden is a clay pile dug from our basement, the worst soil in the yard; but you work with what you have, and it’s up to you to make it better. So I do—intention and time. The green mulch and cover growth will turn the orange clay dark and brown in time: patience and plan is the best fertilizer for enrichment.
I sow collards, spinach, seed butternut squash to crawl and vine over ground for rich soups when summer turns fall, and another row of beans should the weeds prevail where my weeding suppressed to give them chance again.
Back row of the yard, more beans climb on wooden poles threaded into fence of loose barbed wire. Given structure, vines wander still, taking onto grass stems and weed stalks of last season if not guided back to their wooden poles. I tend and guide and help as best I know. I wonder how often God does the same, guiding and aiding and gently redirecting us in our ascension as we wander blind, clinging to what we find and take as path.
Last year, I tried a trellis of fishing line. It was too flimsy. Vines wrapped to the fishing lines, but I used spider wire and not stretching tensile and play in the lines, when under weight of vines’ growth, strangled the stalks, and it did not work as I hoped. This year, I am back at the posts cut from cleaning out fence rows with ax and pruning straight with same. One project affords benefit to another, and both are improved. Interdependence, alignment of work—there’s never enough time, but overlap of effects always aids.
Labor for evening nearly done, I cut leaves from the collards I have (or maybe they’re broccoli that hasn’t headed; I know I planted them close and the stalks don’t exactly appear as collards, and the leaves aren’t as broad—but they taste the same when cooked).
I sear them in a skillet—oil, red wine vinegar. I cut the first onion from the garden.
My eyes water, and when I eat of it, it has that little bit of heat some have and some don’t but I always love in the flavor.
Meal consumed, night setting, I am tired of my labor—not just garden, but all before that is separate from this story.
One last time, I go outside. I listen to summer evening songs and feel how the sky is changed, soften of the heat in evening’s stretch of shadows—day tired too and ready for rest.
After, like sun and sky, I go to sleep. Labor of day, summer solstice passed, like sun and sky, I sleep longer and later than night before.