Summer Gardening 3

The grand experiment of growing a second garden went fifty percent bust with the loss of my beets to an animal that ate the tops of the few that had sprouted. My snow peas, though, remained green, promising a good crop. Meanwhile, sparkling waves of goldfinches visited the towering sunflowers. What a pleasure to see so many of the bright yellow birds feasting on the seeds!

My Sunflowers on July 11, 2016

The patch of earth where I grow vegetables occupied much of my spring and summer. You could say I was focused on the garden. Nearly every day found me bending to pull weeds so as to keep the area as productive as possible. In early August, the lack of rainfall prompted me to pump water from the spring-fed well every other day, to carry the buckets to the garden, and to pour them on the row of snow peas and the half rows of gladiolus corms, now in full flower from cool pink to hot pink. I started the corms late, and not all of them thrived.

I noticed that a few of the beans were blooming again. I wondered if I would get another bushel from the spectacularly productive plants.

A Cat Among the Squash on July 11, 2016

At a time when I would have been preparing to teach early American literature in the fall semester, I spent my days as a retiree appreciating the curling tendrils of snow peas and the joyous flutter of goldfinch wings. Life had come down to terms simpler than those to which I had become accustomed during the thirty-four years I had taught a grueling four-course load. While I loved teaching, I was finding that I loved the tranquility of the garden. Under the blazing sun, passages from the great works that I had taught flitted in and out of my memory like finches visiting sunflowers. For me, living in retirement was becoming more elemental: less the elaborate construction of creative minds. The garden presented philosophy in starkest conditions: cycles of life and death, as well as beauty arising from the human touch but taking its own forms without reference to the gardener.

I found the snow peas in the hot soil of the August garden symbolic of Thomas Aquinas. The vital spark sprouted the material plants from the seed peas and unfolded their leaves. Studying their growth inspired my intellectual responses. I was connected to the peas by having planted them, but I was disconnected from their life, which I had not created. I was both in the picture of my garden and out of it. The more I contemplated my vegetables, the less I felt the presence of ego. I did not vanish, for I was necessary to keep the garden weeded; but the “I” so often at the forefront of my waking activities counted for less and was quiet in the face of such a splendid nature that hardly needed me.

I looked forward to dining on fresh snow peas.

Summer Gardening 2

Coaxing a second season from my garden was more challenging than I thought it would be. Only a tiny portion of my beets appeared above ground. I stood in the hot sun in the dusty ground surrounded by towering sunflowers and looked carefully for beets among the small crabgrass clumps in the row that I had not plowed or plucked. There were perhaps twenty beets. I shook my head in disappointment.

Sunflowers Twice As Tall As I Am

The snow peas, though, were thick and green in the adjacent row. They were the soft green that snow peas always are, and they were enjoying the intense heat of the season. I should have thought that snow peas would have preferred the cool weather of spring, but the happy plants belied my perceptions. Such an ironic name, “snow peas,” in the midst of the hottest weather of the year!

Snow Peas on July 17th

I pulled most of the squash plants from the ground. They were finished producing, and I wanted to keep their area free of weeds. I had harvested three bushels of beans from my two rows, and I picked another half bushel. My guess was that the beans might not set on again.

Potato Harvest

The sunflowers were the real story of late July and early August. I had purchased mixtures of seeds, and I was not disappointed. The tallest of the sunflowers reached twelve feet. What amazing growth! Think of them! Seeds in the loose earth sprouted in April, spread roots, sent up a stalk, added leaves, and kept strengthening and extending the stalk until the flower stood twice as tall as I am! From the soil came this magnificent display!

In my solarium were trays filled with the potatoes I had carefully lifted from the ground: more potatoes than I have ever grown, and all of them from only two rows! On my screened porch stood the old grocery wire shelving on wheels that I use to dry my onions. Yellow and white onions far larger than I have had in years past were spread in tiers on the shelves. I planned to gather them in groups, tie them with twine, and hang them from nails in the solarium. I wondered if I had enough nails!

It had been a splendid garden, but it would have so few second-crop beets! There probably would not be enough to justify canning them.

Later, when I returned to weed the garden, I discovered that an animal—probably a bunny—had eaten the tops of most of the beets that had managed to come up. I had only three left! I hope the rabbit enjoyed the beets.

The snow peas were still abundant and growing richly. I kept them watered.

A pleasant outcome of the summer, salad tomatoes from voluntary vines that I had permitted to start among my lettuces when I still had rows of lettuce were now golden yellow and good! The few tomato vines that I had allowed to grow were scattered across the broad area where the rows had been, and I could easily go from one to the next without stepping on them. I collected many of the yellow baubles to decorate lunch bowls of spinach leaves or to serve as snacks.   

Summer Gardening 1

I have always planted my garden early, harvested the vegetables early, and stepped aside in late July to let crabgrass and pigweed take over.

This year, I did not follow my usual practice.

For the first time, I experimented with a second crop. On the 7th of July, I planted a row of snow peas and a row of beets. By the 17th, the peas were well above the surface of the earth, but the beets had not yet made their appearance. I wondered what was keeping them.

Diver’s in Middletown, Ohio

Which Has Everything for Gardeners

And Where I Bought My Seeds

I felt under obligation to prevent pigweed and crabgrass from growing. The pigweed presented no problem. The little pigweed starts were easily pulled. The crabgrass posed a challenge. When the ground was dry, the blades of the grass tore off between my thumb and forefinger, but the roots remained in the soil—ready to send up more blades within a short time. I had to hunker down and dig the roots with a trowel. A steady rain on the 18th meant that I spent a few hours digging crabgrass on the 19th; the soil was nicely workable after the showers.

Bean Harvest 2016

When I first picked beans in mid-July, I picked a bushel of them. I think I noticed a phenomenon. My beekeeper friends can correct me if I misunderstood the situation. I began combing the bush bean plants for beans not long after the sun had come up. When I was perhaps a third of the way through my two rows of beans, buzzing interrupted the quiet. Bees were busily collecting pollen from the sunflowers and squash blossoms. I have the impression that the bees arrived all at once, as if they had awakened at the same minute. Perhaps the angle of the sun served to signal the bees that it was time to fly to the flowers.

Having harvested the lettuce long ago, the beets next, the carrots after the beets, and the onions most recently, I cleared half of the garden space. In that open area were my voluntary salad tomatoes and my new rows of snow peas and beets. My original beets were canned, my carrots were frozen, and my onions were dried on a tall steel rack that I wheel onto my screened porch for the purpose every July. Later, when the onion stalks had dried completely, I tied bunches of onions with twine and hung them from nails in my solarium. Throughout the fall and well into the winter each year, the walls are decorated with golden and bronze onions.

When I first planted my snow peas and beets in mid-season, I was full of anticipation. I hoped they would thrive, but I had never tried to grow a second crop of vegetables so late in the year. I worried, asking myself questions I could not answer. Will they struggle with the heat? Can I keep the plants watered? Will the crabgrass take over, despite my best efforts? As so often happens, my excitement was mingled with trepidation.

My Summer in a Garden: Weeding 3.0

Abundant rain kept me out of my garden. After the wet spell, I strolled out to take a proud view of my neat rows. I saw a carpet of thick, tall weeds carpeting the ground. “I must have been mistaken,” I thought. “I must have imagined that I weeded and hoed this garden a week ago. It could not have been this garden that I so carefully tended. Maybe I accidentally weeded and hoed someone else’s garden.”

Garden Coming Along on June 21st

I took my trusty hoe and began. The weeds were worse than they were before. Fortunately, the rain had made the ground easy to work. It was no trouble to pull the largest weeds, root and all. There were just so many of them! Also, the hoe cut through the upper surface of the ground just enough to clip the stems from the roots of the weeds too small to pull. The summer solstice had come and gone, and the heat was much higher than it had been even a week earlier. I follow the practice of my father and the old-time farmers: I wear jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat. I prefer not to be sunburned, and the long sleeves keep me less hot than I would be otherwise. Even with my protective clothing, I soon felt perspiration, which soaked through my shirt. Before long, even my jeans were damp!

Garden After Third Massive Weeding

I struck the hoe over and over against tough roots. I bent low over rows to pull huge pigweeds from amid the potatoes. I could not believe that, for the third time this year, I was involved in a monstrous weeding, as if the previous two weedings had been for nothing.

Next year, before I order seeds, I will read my blogs. Maybe I will become a regular customer at the farmer’s market and will skip gardening. What joy is there in repeating exactly the same hard work of a week ago?

The fact that many of my seeds had not sprouted in the first place was haunting me now. Large gaps were not shaded by the leaves of vegetables and had to be hoed smooth. Not far from where I live is a perfect garden of about the same size as mine. It stands so near the road that I am forced to look upon it. The rows are as straight as a ruler, the plants are spaced exactly alike down the rows, the stakes have the same height throughout and do not lean, and the weeds—well, there are none. What gardener has the patience and the good luck to have a garden like that? I would ask the owner if I could take a picture to post online, but I fear that the obsessive compulsive individual might rightly ask to see my garden. So everyone will have to imagine how faultless and immaculate that other garden is.

The First Flowers in My Garden

My garden is what a garden is meant to be: haphazard, uneven, inexact, and overgrown in spots. Of course, the previous sentence is only a literary stunt intended to sound true but a cheap alibi nonetheless. I wish my rows were as satisfactory as those of my neighbor, but, before I covet my neighbor’s cucumber, I will content myself by saying that, after I hoed my last weed, I harvested three fat zucchini that will send me into an ecstatic state of mind at my dinner table. As I carried them to the house, I almost forgot my aching back.