State of the Garden (It’s Like a Jungle Sometimes…)
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State of the Garden
How blessed I feel to be able to come home at the end of October to some bounty and to be able to eat it straight from the plant without worry.
How blessed I feel to be able to come home at the end of October to some bounty and to be able to eat it straight from the plant without worry.
It has been too cold for the nasturtium seeds I sowed a few weeks ago to germinate. By the time they germinate and grow, it will be too hot for the plants to thrive. (As a landscaper neighbor and friend of mine said of this dilemma this morning: “welcome to spring in Washington”). Nasturtiums love cool weather and really only do well in my garden until June.
The solution: I bought a few seedlings. I planted the seedlings where I sowed the seeds. By the time the seedlings have long since flowered and are starting to get leggy, the seeds will have germinated, and I’ll get nasturtiums for an extra few weeks at the end when it starts to get hot.
This combination of sowing seeds and planting seedlings also works well for me with annual herbs such as basil, dill, and parsley. The seedlings give me a few weeks head start; the seeds give me plentiful, inexpensive new plants when the plants that started in my garden as seedlings are starting to bolt.
I do only seeds for greens — kale, chard, mache, arugula, spinach, cilantro and beets. I can sow them in March and by now they are starting to feed me. I do only seedlings for tomatoes and peppers (I don’t have the facilities to get strong seedlings and starting with seedlings extends my growing season up 6-8 weeks).
It would be wonderful to garden entirely from seeds (swapped or harvested from last year), but the reality is that I am not a full-time gardener, but want to have a garden full-time.
First flower on a cherry tomato appeared overnight. Peppers are budding. They all like the heat. Dill is going yellow around the edges already. It does not like the heat. One of the things I love most about gardening is noticing what thrives to excess and what struggles, depending on the weather patterns. With the right balance of plants, there will always be a bumper crop of something (both edible and ornamental). Eating locally, with consciousness acknowledgement of the limits of space and time in an affirming way, requires accepting what are the crops of the year and being creative with them rather than finding a recipe and insisting that the ingredients be available to the detriment of flavor, pocketbook, and environment.
Fostering such a relationship to my garden and my food helps me also accept that although I can grow and shift, I ultimately cannot change certain fundamental things about myself. It is better radically to affirm what I have been given than to try and contort myself into something that it seems society (Heideggerian “they”) would prefer.
