I've seen the first sign of changing colours in the trees and there's a wrapping-up sort of feeling to the air. The weather has been so wild and weird this summer that I hardly know what to expect from the garden anymore. The cool-weather things like lettuce and kale hardly did anything this year, compared to the bags and bags we got last year. The asparagus and rhubarb were great as always. The tomatoes seem happy, the peppers and cucumbers have never done so well, and the green onions are two feet tall. The broccoli was disappointing but gave a valiant effort. The green beans have been amazing and abundant. The dry beans are starting to dry in their pods now, rattling and papery and satisfying to pop open. But the cabbages are the size of softballs, the radishes and beets hardly surfaced, the carrots didn't even bother germinating, we got about five pathetic zucchini in total, and the spaghetti squash produced only one tiny squash that the rabbits promptly ate. Now it's suddenly putting out vines fifteen feet long, though, that have leaped from the bed, climbed the asparagus fern, and sprinted for the hedge.
Every year I plan and dream and sometimes I'm satisfied and other times I'm disappointed. But no matter how strange the weather or uncooperative the vegetables, every February still finds me drooling over seed catalogues and planning for the next garden. Gardeners never give up. They just work themselves into the ground.
Gardening is all about looking forward, never being in the now. No wonder zen meditation is so difficult for me! The very definition of planting a seed is to live in the future.
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