238/365 Gardening

I had a good, but unexpected, garden this year. Tomatoes, my usual standby, produced nothing. Beautiful plants, blooms, green tomatoes, and nothing went anywhere. Green fruit rotted on the vines. My cucumber plants, however, were insanely productive. I "put up" 18 quarts of pickles. Crazy. The basil and parsley produced average years, turning in to pesto for the freezer. And the garlic was prolific, mostly because I neglected to harvest much last year.

Each of those plants tells me a story. It's so hard, the older I get, to not see things through a parable lens. I expected nothing from the cucumbers, for instance, because they have always, for as long as I've lived here, let me down. I put up poles from them to climb but otherwise did nothing. They were planted only because I needed to let that side of the garden rest from several years of tomatoes being planted there. It was time to rotate but I wasn't going to help them. By the time I picked the last cucumber, they were covered in aphids and ants and ladybugs and parisitic wasps and caterpillars and cucumber beetles. They gave their all. Maybe I just hadn't given them what they needed in terms too much attention or not the right location. Sometimes you just need to be left alone to do what you need to do. In the right place.

Tomatoes have always produced. Some years they're better than others, but we always have salad tomatoes and something to put up--either tomato sauce or frozen tomato puree or even salsa verde if there's an early frost warning. But they've always been at home on the east side of the garden, and I moved them to the west to give the soil a year to rest from their needs. And they obviously were not pleased with the relocation. Who ever is?

The basil and parsley are low-maintenance crops, growing wherever and always producing--since their crop is just leaves, and they aren't prone to bolting (and bitterness) like lettuces, they don't take much. Just hot sun and watering. The most basic of needs and the most basic of returns--but if I fussed over them, they wouldn't produce any more than they do this way. You give what you can if you have what you need. More is not always better.

And the garlic? Give them more time to grow and you get better results. They drop their own seeds and I already have next year's seedlings sprouting up where the cucumber plants have been pulled up. They're a weed in my yard, the best weed ever, and we get along just fine. This year I did clip the scapes (the top flower) on about half of them, to get a bigger bulb to grow, but not all of them. Some of them have to seed and drop for next year. I can't have everything I want or else there's nothing for the future.

See? Not deep or profound, but everything is a lesson these days.