It seems that every year I go through the same circle, which I’m thinking now might be just different stages of the same disease.
It starts every spring when plants and seeds appear in stores all around town and I want them all. As soon as the world around me adds a notch of green to its pallet, my brain just starts coming up with new gardening projects. I’m not sure if it’s contagious or just seasonally synchronized, but I noticed that both my husband and I get it every year, and so do hundreds of people that can be spotted at gardening sections. Same excitement on their faces and same doubts if they should take that 25th flower or not, same fully-loaded carts, same plant hunger in their eyes. That’s stage one. Stage one is pretty creative.
This year for my projects, I pulled out a birdbath and an old wheel, put a metal pyramid into the flower bed, ordered a solar watering pot, found an old wagon and bought an endless amount of all kinds of good stuff for the soil. And that’s just so far. Hubby has been planning on bringing old discers and maybe even an old tractor to build a raised cucumber patch/train.
Once all hundreds of seeds and plants make it to the house, soon I get to stage two – a tough one. That’s when I actually have to seed and plant all of my craziness. At stage two every year, I think that I should have never bought so much. Even though now we have two neighbours in the garden, the veggies that our side of the garden produces are still enough to feed a few families. And I don’t even have room for all the flowers that I get myself into. So at stage two, I hang out in the flowerbed and the garden, swearing at myself for being so greedy for no need.
Then, once the chores of planting the ocean are in the books, comes stage three. That’s the exciting one. Every morning, with coffee in my hands, I rush outside to see what has changed. Is there anything growing? Is there anything blooming? Any produce yet? Those little sprouts make me so happy. I’d try to describe that delight, but I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Watching nature do its magic when the first green sprouts come out of a seed that you just put in the dirt, and then that sprout turns into a tomato tree, is unbelievable. And see my flowers peek through, grow and give it all they have so soon is pure joy for me.
But then comes stage four – trouble. There is no single issue that kills me every time. Sometimes they all come at once, and other summers, rarely, it’s just one problem. Last year, grasshoppers turned my flowerbed into a dessert. A few years ago, a hail storm/tornado killed everything in mid-June. Weeds are another insane story. Sometimes it’s heat, other times it’s rain, and every so often it’s an early frost. At that point, after I spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars and endless hours of work to have a nice garden and to beautify the yard, I usually sink into despair. Why? Why did I start it all? How did I get trapped again? I should have known better that all my projects will not turn out the way I want them, because they just never do. Not when it comes to Mother Nature and her tricks.
Stage five comes in fall after we harvest all there’s left of the garden after bunnies, moles, raccoons, deer and bugs get their share of our work; and after I enjoy the few flowers that made it despite the challenges and actually bloomed for me in the half-empty flowerbed. When everything starts turning grey after fields are stripped naked and the air smells like death.
That’s when my short-term memory fails. I so want everything to stay green, that I hit the stores to get some peat moss, top soil and who knows what else to enrich my flowerbed for the future. We bring loads of manure and straw from the farm to till it into the garden to feed it. The dirt is black and naked again, and I feel like I’d do anything for it to bring life back.
So once all those efforts and money are buried into the ground once again, it almost guarantees that come spring, I will fall for the gardening fever again.
Gardening often feels like a weird obsession in this day and age, when it’s easier and maybe even cheaper to buy it all from stores. But we’ve been growing our food for thousands of years, and the last century can’t cancel that historic memory. The same goes for flowers: it’s in humans’ nature to beautify ourselves and the world around us. And even though we can do it through many other means now, we still get subdued by such simple and at the same time endlessly complicated things as flowers.
And while my gardening fever makes me laugh at myself every year, I sincerely appreciate that natural connection and all emotions it gives me. Oh, and also the flavour of crunchy, fresh-of-the-garden cucumbers.
