Remember and Don't Forget

Remember to garden next year, don't forget that you love it and it's worth the annoyance of getting out your flats and cells in February.

I'm going to shift into winter mode now. Leaves are falling, snow will follow, and I won't have much to say on the garden for a while. I'll be over here, if you want to watch the circus I'm making of my life.

Guest Speaker Today

Back in April, she'd have killed for a tomato. Not the imported store tomatoes that were strip-mined in Texas, but fresh garden tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. That's how my mother felt, too, back then in my youth, so in May she set out thirty or forty tomato plants to satisfy our tomato lust and now, going into August, fresh tomatoes are no more rare or wonderful than rocks, each of us has eaten a bushel of them and there are plenty left where those came from.
One night, she and I snuck over to the Tollefsons' after their lights went out and left a half-bushel of tomatoes on their back step.

Garrison Keillor, from Lake Wobegon Days 

A Late Summer Overview

the September garden:

Thinking of year one in the garden, all I can say in summary is "surprise." I put a few sunflower seeds down, only to watch the young stalks be mowed down by rabbits, then miraculously shoot up again and bring hundreds of bees out of hiding. I put a few little herb transplants side by side, then struggled to find enough room for them as they outgrew my expectations. My kale grew short and bushy and my amaranth grew tall and spindly, completely messing up my attempts at ornamental-edible. 

Surprise, we accomplished more in a summer than I was going to allow myself to do, surprise, home ownership makes a fiend out of me, surprise, let's put rocks between the pavers and not creeping chamomile. Surprise, we have really great friends, though that should not have come as a surprise.

I treat gardening as an experiment. Part of me thinks that after a few good experimental years I would have a better grasp on this stuff: what works in Minnesota, how big things get, how to get carrots to germinate... but I still feel like I'm just fooling, just playing around, and I never know what to expect. Now I'm beginning to think that that's how gardening is supposed to be - that "experiment" is the wrong word because it connotes repeatable results, and no garden I know has grown the same way twice. Maybe "conversation" is a better description of what I'm doing out there - making little suggestions, getting some sassy vegetable retort, confessing "I love you anyway," and seeing the discussion from a different perspective - but that makes me sound a bit crazy, doesn't it.

the changing landscape