Enjoying Bounty

June 7, 2022
Beloved:
          My garden is in, mostly.  I want to plant some bean seeds, but the ground is still too wet.  They come up quickly so I’m not worried yet.  Also some mammoth sunflowers, which I’ve  planted every year and never gotten no more than a stalk or two, because the chickens always scratched them up and ate them.  But the chickens have retired to an Owen County barnyard, so my hope is renewed.  We took out three enormous redbuds and paid a nice man to build a sturdy fence around a raised bed garden.  Before the plants were in the dirt, at least one raccoon scaled the fence and left my beautiful new garden looking like a frat house lawn after Little Five.  At Tractor Supply a nice man named David sold me everything I need and explained exactly how to install the electric cable that will encourage the raccoons to go elsewhere for their nocturnal calamity.  I haven’t installed it yet but absolutely must, as my pepper and tomato plants have baby blooms on them already.
          Nothing feeds my deep self like growing food and flowers.  We’ll use every tomato and make all the basil into pesto, but I doubt we’ll eat more than a picking or two of green beans. The rest I’ll leave in paper bags by the mailboxes for the neighbors.  The same for cucumbers, which I’ll also be sick of by the end of summer.  Garden math blows my mind every single season:  how one bean seed makes dozens of green beans, each bean containing another half dozen seeds.  And squash!  Good Lord, one squash seed becomes hundreds more seeds just like itself.  A tomato seed makes thousands.  You’d think my garden bed would be full of new vegetable starts each spring, instead of weeds upon weeds upon weeds.  How I wish I loved to weed the way I love to prune and stake and fuss over my vegetables.  It’s one reason I’m transitioning to raised beds, that and for conserving water.  In raised beds I’ll use rainwater almost exclusively, which I am excited about.
          Of course, if my family depended upon this garden to survive, we’d all starve by Christ-mas time.  We survive on the backbreaking labor of people we will never meet.  My few minutes a day bent over my little plants is a good reminder to be grateful for them.  All the same, June, July and August have to be the best time of the year to live and eat in the corn belt of this country.  Watermelon, corn, tomatoes, beans, peaches, berries and all the rest – get yourself to Farmers Market as often as you can this summer and be grateful for the bounty of the earth.

​Last summer’s beautiful, loaded black cherry tomato plants.  We didn’t get a single tomato before the raccoons ripped them out of the ground and dragged them across the yard

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