I have acquisitioned a plot in Good Shepherd's community garden. I plunked some seeds from a trusting and knowledgeable friend who never-the-less has seriously overestimated my abilities. Things like "swiss chard" and "peppers" went from her seed packets into my plot, and a tomato plant I acquired on Amazon (did you know you can buy plants on Amazon? Weird). Even so, it looks pretty dismal.
But then yesterday someone from church, let me rephrase that, lovely people from church brought vast amounts of tomato and squash plants and set them carefully next to my dead brown smear of earth. In the evening, as an act faith (the American kind, not the biblical kind) I tossed back a glass of wine and mucked them about into the soil. So now half my plot is alive and thriving (at least for the night) and the other half still looks rather dead. I'm going to give it three more days before I plow it under and move the squashes over.
And on Saturday I dug up a very sick rose bush and moved it gently and prayerfully to a different spot. And along the side of the house sunflowers are coming up where I didn't plant them. And I took a clipping from a bush in the front and plunked it in the ground in the back in the hopes that it will not die, but will live and grow.
Matt generally watches me messing around in the dirt with a tolerantly sarcastic air. Apparently he knows how to make plants stay alive. That being the case, he doesn't understand the terror and thrill of putting something in the ground and having it come up. He is nonchalant. He is breezy. He says lightly, "it will be fine." But also he doesn't know what a miraculous and tenuous occurrence it is, to have the wretched thing actually grow.
2 comments:
A few years back I finally got around to putting in a real garden. The first plantings were so promising and lo and behold the moment a hint of red came about, the birds, the blasted birds, dive bombed the plant and pecked it dead. After numerous attempts to keep the bloody birds out of my garden, my hubby took pity on me and constructed walls made of bird wire. Those stupid birds were not happy. But the rabbits were. So up went the rabbit wire. Now we call it the plant prison.
Jackie
I generally refuse to garden, as the menacing presence of APHIDS! APHIDS EVERYWHERE is so disheartening. I am in awe whenever the roses bloom regardless (and they always do! It's amazing). :P
My mother's advice is generally plant everything, and if it lives, it was meant to grow there, and if it dies, find something else to plant... I guess that's sort of my rule of thumb. The allotment gardens here have amazing fruit trees in them, maybe someone should start one for the GS garden.
~R
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