There is a bag beside me filled with seeds and potatoes for tomorrow. For the most part, my early efforts didn’t work—and so I try again.
The onions are beginning to break through from bulbs, hollow green shoots through the worked clay loam. They are far from uniform, or complete from breaking, but they have begun to break through—and that is something.
Lettuce is dappled green across a ferrous brown. It is a simple one to start.
The rest—broccoli, cabbages, brussels sprouts, bok choi, spinach, and collards—I started too early, transplanted the same, and cold and conditions killed them off (one broccoli seedling still surives).
My plan didn’t work. This time, I will leave it to caprice and what the world brings forth to raise. Digging through old seed packets stored (there is little that I hoard, but seeds are becoming one; kept in old coffee containers), I find all the brassicas attempted before—and then some (kale and mustard greens). Rather than plan, lay them out all neat and nice, I plan to scatter them with little regard—get them growing, make sense of it later.
I’ve overseeded the area with green mulch—oats and peas. Both are beginning to break and emerge. There is much still in germination and waiting to appear in rise.
I intend to work the ground once more, kill the cover and returning weeds that are there before I spread and scatter seed. After that, I’ll leave it to chance; thinning, spreading, weeding green mulch in competition as conditions and necessity suggests.
Other than that, I’ll leave arrangement and conditions mostly wild. I enjoy picking through summer oats, waist high and large seed headed—larger and thinner seeds than brome, of stalks deep in green. I like picking peas from the covered ground in space between; eating them were they are, never bringing a basket back beyond the garden. It’s a summer treat one enjoys only when going to the garden. The treat is for those that keep showing up; not those who wait or stay away.
Rewards should be that way.
I’m planting yellow potatoes—Yukon Golds. I’m changing it up this year. I’m 0-2 on potato attempts. The first year, I tried in a pasture and the cattle broke through the hotwire and mowed the plants down as forage. Last year, I tried in containers. I spent many good hours mounding dirt for very little return (I planted into closed containers with limit to root depth and reach).
This year, I’m planting in the backyard where I can manage, will use T-posts and mesh wire to contain the vines as they begin ascend and mound not with dug and piled soil but an old bale no cattle wanted. A new year, a new try, isn’t a part of life about experimenting and learning through trial and error? It makes the final “getting it” that much more rewarding; even if we look like idiots to ourselves and others in the years of failures and errors I choose to call “learning.”
Each year, my garden grows. It doesn’t make me a good gardener. It just means there are more things I would like to try. To do that, one needs more space—and so my garden grows (I’d rather work plants than mow grass anyway—reinforce and grow what you enjoy. Why stay busy in duties that you don’t?).
I’m holding to old lore, Saint Patrick’s Day I heard, and so I’ll follow even if others move days and times to fit the windows when ground and they will work (does not really matter? Isn’t the point and fun in the doing, whenever and however one is able?).
Life’s short: do what you enjoy, grow your garden as you wish. Enjoy the work, the time, the sun, lessons, failures, and bounty-rewards that come from playing in the dirt; never too old to outgrow origins that cultivated not just land, but us; making mankind as it is.
Maybe the world could use a little more grounding, simplicity, and perspective. What better place to begin than a garden: where you eat not what you kill, but grow.