It has been a good year for the garden. Plenty has been learned in terms of how-to, plenty grown, plenty eaten. In fact, as far as the final category goes, I wouldn't be surprised if say by November the bounty amounts to well over a third of what my wife and I will have eaten this summer and fall. And the value of the produce continues into the winter months as well. As many potatoes and onions as seems practicable will be put into dry storage (we store them suspended on chicken wire spread between the beams in the basement, so when we walk around here in the house, the potatoes and onions are literally right there underfoot.) The zucchini will live on in zucchini bread frozen in the freezer; the leeks likewise in leek-potato soup frozen in jars. And most of our tomatoes have already been converted into sauce, which this year we pressure-canned. In a few weeks too, we'll harvest (from the dried up vines) all the hard-won and long-awaited trophies of our winter squashes. Many of these will keep all the way until the garden is producing again next year: a kind of bridge over seasons, a bridge of nourishment.
The garden that feeds us at Sunnyside is not even located on the premises. It's down the way at my brother-in-law's. The necessary land is shared as a gift in the family. And the labor too has been shared. Especially during our camping trip this summer we Sunnysiders had to count on others in the family watering nearly daily what at the time were just delicate aspiring seedlings. Without the help of family there's no way the garden would have turned out as bountiful as it did. I suppose if there is any advice I would give to anyone who wants to take up gardening with any level of seriousness, it would be this: try to find people who can help you out on occasion. Family is probably best. But maybe a neighbor or a friend who likes fresh produce can be of help as well. Or maybe a neighbor kid who could use a little extra cash. Otherwise, especially when you're away, all your hard work as well as your future harvest lies purely at the mercy of the elements.
Some of our best choices this year in regard to the garden had to do with our concern to make it beautiful. We planted (right there in among the vegetable beds) all sorts of flowers: nasturtiums, marigolds, buckwheat, borage, morning glories of all colors, and the tall cosmos with its saffron-colored blooms. All these spiffed up the appearance of the garden even as they attracted the bumble bees, honey bees, and butterflies necessary to pollinate our crops. They also rendered the garden a more cheerful place in which to work, I mean for humans! And I have an idea that they helped to make my brother-in-law happy too, just to know that his faith in the family's ability to follow through on a project as big as this, taking place right there in his yard, wasn't misplaced. No, we all came through, and here we have it, just what we aimed for: a green space designed in love, reflecting a striving toward mutual nourishment.
Not to say everything's perfect, especially appearance-wise! In fact, it's important to say that if you want to start a garden, and especially a vegetable garden, it's best, from the start, to accept certain truths: one of which is that a vegetable garden doesn't always look that great. Oh at certain times of the year, particularly in the late spring early summer, when all the plants are so green and new and vibrant-looking they seem ready to jump out of the earth and run around root-naked in the sun when no one's looking--THEN a vegetable garden looks beautiful. What about toward late summer though? I mean when the potato vines outgrow their beds and take to crawling over the paths, and the Japanese beetles have chawed the raspberry leaves to a kind of tattered lace, and a windstorm or two has passed through, toppling the bamboo bean trellises, and the tomato plants have become gangly and long and almost squid-like in their cages, and mildew has crept over the squash leaves like a sickly white frost, and the corn stalks have been trampled and ransacked by the coons, those Visigoths of the urban treetops and alley ways.
Even rip-roaring production success sometimes converts to cosmetic disaster. At the West end of our garden is a squash vine on a trellis, a vine that proved so productive this year, so ponderous with squashes, that one day its trellis just keeled right over, taking the vine with it. The whole business fell on the compost bin, and since the trellis could not be raised off of the bin without risking damage to the vine, composting operations had to be suspended in that location. It's all a snaky mess. A glorious snaky mess, but nevertheless a mess. We live and learn. Better luck next season, when a stronger trellis will be the order of the day. Or maybe we'll just not plant a squash vine there.
So. If youthful looks in plants and perpetual neatness in presentation are your concern, don't plant a vegetable garden. Vegetable gardens, just like people, age and wrinkle and wither and die. Which process has its beauty too of course, and brings up another blessing that inheres to the art of gardening; that it helps you come to terms with difficult truths such as mortality, yes it gives you plenty of annual practice with mortality. Every year you watch your plants move from one stage of existence to the next: from birth to seedling infancy to sapling adolescence to middle age and fruitfulness to old age and death and decay by means of which they return to the soil from which they came. And they soil is key to this wisdom, because every year you learn again that the soil is really a means of transforming death and decay into the potential for life. The soil is like a battery of life, charged with the stuff of death. The more death in it, in the form of converted organic matter, the richer its potential for life. Or it is like the nebulae in deep space--clouds of gas and dust where stars are born. Light springs from the chaos of the cloud, but the cloud has to be there first.
Two questions for this turn of the seasons called September: How might we live in such a way as to add to the metaphoric star clouds and soil of our collective future, the greatest possible potential for life? At what point in our individual lives do we say, "I have taken enough to grow; now truly I must begin to bear fruit and die?"
HB
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