Garden Revelations

Though its hard work I’ve always enjoyed my garden. For me, it’s a comforting place of birth, growth, renewal and revelations. This year however some of the enjoyment has diminished, due to the bad growing season. Which I’m sure has tested the most optimistic gardener’s peace of mind with a summer of too much rain and too many cold nights, for that perfect garden to grow.

Having a garden every year for a long time now, I understand how we gardeners feel about our tilled plots of soil. We sow our ideas when we first set the till to ground and take growing a garden personally. So often, our gardens success or failure, to us, represents what we did right or wrong. This makes me empathetic towards anyone who tried growing their first garden this year. However, I don’t believe this years success or failure, is about what any of us did right or wrong, it’s about the reminder of who’s really in control, and that is Mother Nature.

I was in the big garden trying to salvage 20 some tomato plants from the threat of blight and the ravages that this unpredictable growing season brought upon them. I usually love my garden. But this year, I’m not liking it much, especially this day, because there’s no saving my tomato plants.

This got me thinking of the days when a farmer did not grow a garden for fun or the luxury of a full pantry to save money over the winter. No, they grew their garden for food or income to sustain them over, usually, a long, hard winter.

So what would they have done in a growing season such as this? When hay is almost impossible to get in, tomatoes are dying on the vines, later potatoes are rotting in the ground and the slugs have demolished the beans. What and how did they live beyond the loss of their crops?

As I stood amongst my dying tomatoes and slug eaten beans, I had visions of tired farmers and livestock from years ago. Both whom worked long hours to grow corn to sell, vegetables to can, hay to feed livestock and wheat to grind into flours. Envisioning these almost defeated farmers standing amidst their non-producing fields wondering what their next step would be, I asked myself, what did they do when their lives depended on a good growing season that never came? How did they survive the wrath that Mother Nature can instill?

Then I pictured a chain reaction, of their inability to feed their family so the family did not have the stamina to work. Nor did they have enough feed to care for their livestock, so the cows stopped giving milk and the chickens stopped laying eggs. Maybe their livestock died or worse, they had to sell it because they could not feed them and or they needed money to feed their families. Ultimately leaving them with nothing to work their garden next year…except a single hand held hoe sitting propped in the corner of their barn.

After thinking of this my feelings of joylessness at my lack of a good garden turned to admiration to those who lived and worked the land before me. In the face of a bad season such as this, they still survived, picked themselves up and started again. They are the ones who in the face of diversity moved on and kept this country moving. They made the best of what they did get from an un-producing garden, planned ahead for next year, lived within their means for that season, hoping and praying that next year would be better, and then figured out where to start again.

They knew that with out that one small step to start again, they would not be able to finish, so they and their hand held hoe, start hoeing the earth the next season, with optimism of a good year. They hoed early crops, saved some and sold some to buy a new horse and plow. They planted potatoes, saved some, sold some to buy a new cow for milk and a couple of chickens for eggs. They sold their eggs to buy a new wagon to carry hay and wheat. They harvested their wheat, saved some, sold some that gave them money to buy what they needed next. Thus, the cycle of the garden and the gardener began again, a place of birth, growth, renewal and revelations, all with one-step into the new garden with that single hoe, thrown over the shoulder, ready to break ground.

Some Pictures

The Bear by my garden June 2009


Before he noticed me taking his picture





Me using up my film









From 2008


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