Monthly Archives: May 2019

I’m currently reading Closing the Food Gap and it’s lighting new fires while dousing others. I keep interrupting my husband’s quiet to read aloud an outrageous statistic here or a shocking history there. Education is not always comfortable.

Twice so far, it’s mentioned that in community garden the most important word is community. I’ve stewed on this a bit. I didn’t join a community garden this round for the community. I joined for the soil to soothe my soul.

When I’d joined in 2012 (same community garden, different plots), I had joined for both the community and the garden. I’d been chastised, looked down upon, and otherwise made to feel wholly unwelcome and less-than during that experience with the community part of the community garden.

So this time, I signed up hoping to garden in peace, quiet, and solitude.

I’ve met more neighboring gardeners in the last six weeks than the entire year I was here last time. Each has been friendly, kind, and generally also hoping to part ways shortly for their own peace and solitude.

Yesterday, I spotted this “Hi” left on the far side of the path between my garden and a neighbor’s I’ve yet to meet. It is one of the main paths in and out of the walled garden. A butterfly had alit beside it.

Yes. I hear you. Community gardening, indeed. (I added an ! before heading home for the day, lacking sufficient supplies for a suitable reply.)

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Okra are coming.

I’ve been weeding by type. With so many weeds, weeding by section wasn’t the name of the game for me.

That one. That one will spread like the dickens deep under ground if it continues to gather sunlight unchecked…

And then the next visit:

And you! You’ll go to seed in another two days whilst your neighbors will slowly crawl.

Not you, little radish, not last week, not yesterday, but today… yes, you.

An untended matter still matters.

I struggle to get over there like I mean to.

But I have to change my shoes… and remember what to bring… and convince myself to put on “somscream.”

Then a trip across the state (don’t laugh, it’s a big state) and it’s been ages.

The squash didn’t mind.

I keep telling myself to refresh my tomato pruning knowledge and actually prune them this year. (I likely won’t.)

Just like I ignored the row spacing instructions suggestions for the cowpeas.

Again, the weeds grew just as, if not more voraciously. I am not accustomed to this. It makes me miss my carefully-crafted, cautiously-curated, mostly weed-free gardens of yore.

Yet I remind myself to be grateful for the bountiful fruitful glorious loam that is this soil. The decades of organic gardening, tending, and watering – even if the Bermuda and torpedo and other such abhorrent invaders have yet to be kept at bay.

Anyone know the name of this invader?

A wander.

A parting gift card burning a hole in my… shelf. I don’t usually have pockets.

Not today, Sunshiney Spike.

It wasn’t quite sprinkling. It wasn’t quite not. It was a rare damp air that isn’t humid here. I wandered.

I’m not sure where my home will be in a few months. Perhaps exactly here. Still. Perhaps wondrously the same.

Still… it may be on the far side of town, or perhaps the far side of the country. (I’ve been talked out of the far side of the world… for now.)

I don’t sit still well. Each day is another urgent drive to another passionate destination. Starting this business today, running that business tomorrow, being enveloped into the wilderness to run feral in the woods the day after that…

It’s all been a bit much.

A bit of a jungle gym, don’t you think?

Untethered.

I am feeling more untethered, two weeks into this sabbatical, than I quite know what to do with.

I don’t recall wild carrot ever being such a sea – in this spot or any other. How the climate change and other human intervention changes so many things.

There was a beautiful field of Indian Paintbrush nearby each spring. Year after year until three years ago. The farmer didn’t mow at some choice winter moment to allow enough light to permeate the heavy grasses laden over the soil. No flowers. And again the next year. And again.

This year, the farmer didn’t mow that same field, but did mow the one across the way and lo and behold – Indian Paintbrush!

Alas, we didn’t put two and two together in time to continue the “children in wildflowers” tradition this spring with that field. There is still time to add it up on some Blanketflower or Coreopsis though…

Beautiful disorder.

I remember worrying about tidy rows. Organized rotations. The choreography of organic vegetable gardening.

I know, now, that milkweed and potatoes can be friends with a volunteer squash sidling up.

Or that an asparagus crown doesn’t mind a four-year-old beet over its head with a pin cushion to the side and lettuce and onions all down the bed.

One more week and the garden isn’t mine. I picked a lot of carrots today.

I am crossing my fingers the seeds from the brassicae will be ready by Monday. I will gather them however they are and find out in a few months if they were ready.

I need to research asparagus crowns. Mine started as seeds in the laundry room years ago and I don’t want to upset them through my ignorance during their removal and transport.

Anyone remember when I planted the potatoes, by chance? I think, sadly, they still have a month to go but perhaps you know differently.