What Lies Beneath

 

Since I last wrote about my garden, a lot has happened. And a lot hasn’t happened.

We went from a wet spring to a few sparse weeks of beautiful summer weather, and then roared into blistering heat. My garden, unable to contend with Mother Nature’s mood swings, had suffered.

Between heat waves, I would wander into my garden and, instead of looking to see what was growing, I looked for destruction. Which crop failed this week? The beds, usually lush and beautiful, have big bare spots where the vegetables failed to grow. Our potato plants, which seemed to be the only crop that survived the wet spring, had dried and brown foliage, leaving me to wonder if my Irish blood somehow invited blight.

While the garden withered so did we. Heat, illness, and general malaise made us wither almost as much as our garden.

In the midst of this ennui, my husband and I trudged out to face our wilting, seemingly dead garden, ready to pull the dead plants, and to grieve over the failed plot. Instead, we found hope.

It began in the carrot bed. While the carrot tops didn’t look too burnt, I was sure our neglect and the weather meant we would only find tiny, woody carrots. Surprisingly, we pulled full, beautiful carrots from the earth.

We found squash blossoms and tiny patty pan squashes hiding beneath the foliage in our squash garden.

Our tomatoes and basils, heat lovers that they are, made promises that the next month will be full of salads and fresh pasta sauces.

We looked-up information about the state of our potato leaves and found out it wasn’t blight, but we were still sure the heat had scorched the plants beyond hope. However, as we began to pull the dead plants from the grow bags, a host of new potatoes came out from under the soil. We had a far bigger crop than we had hoped for even if the plants had survived.

As I stood in front of the kitchen sink, washing our harvest, I thought about how, once again, our garden has managed to teach me a lesson: It has taught me even when it looks like things are beyond all hope, there are positive things happening beneath the surface. Just when you are ready to throw in the towel, you might want to dig just a little deeper because you might just find a happy ending.

Photos of Garden in Augusts Past:

August 2020