As some of you may remember (if you’re still around from last year in spite of my hiatus, I <3 you), last year I planted garlic. We were in the middle of maybe moving and the whole season ended up being weird, but the garlic… the garlic came in a pot from the other house. And it lived out front and I tended it and cared for it and harvested the scapes and made it into pesto. And even though there were only four little garlics, there was much love.
These guys.
And then I forgot about them. I didn’t actually forget, I just never really bothered to look up when to harvest garlic. And it seemed like the ground was probably just as good a place to leave them as my fridge or under my counter. After all, it’s dark and cold in my fridge and it’s dark and cold in the ground, right?
Ok, so I forgot. Until it was way, WAY past time for me to harvest the garlic. And actually I mostly remembered about harvesting the garlic because I realized it was past time for me to be planting garlic AGAIN for this year.
In (sudden, belated, completely pointless by now) great haste, I raced out the door and discovered… Those guys. Looking pretty much just like that. Super cute and resprouted for this year. Awesome.
Why am I the biggest procrastinator of all time??
I did it with seeds too. My awesome neighbor does seed orders every year and offered (twice now – this year AND last year) to let me piggyback on his order. Last year he just flat out gave me seed potatoes because he is sweet and I am pathetic – the seed potatoes that became the potato trees that are now, I am happy to report, replanted in their condo!
I totally failed at piggybacking, or ordering seeds, or anything seed related. Which, as DH pointed out with only a hint of snarky sarcasm, is probably an ok thing because… oh wait, I still have ALL my seeds left from last year. And a few from the year before.
There’s a lot of things on which I could blame my continuing failure to garden. The marriage, the deployment, the rental, the move, the redeployment (fancy Army term for them coming home), vacation, unpacking. All of these are actually fairly reasonable excuses for having planted nothing but some herbs, two tomato plants and a potato condo.
But the real truth is that gardening intimidates me. It’s overwhelming and scary and… also scary.
And I think the idea of putting down roots scares me. The longest I’ve been in any one place since high school is three years. A year and a half is a long time to be in one house (one city even!), and that’s what we’re coming up on this summer. The idea of putting something in the ground and trusting that I’ll be here to see it grow is somehow weird and scary. And that’s not something that comes from having “the Army might move us at any point” looming over my head. (They might. That’s life.) It’s my thing. My weird. My scared.
But fortunately, I still have those seeds from last year and the year before. So the germination rates might be a little wonky. That’s ok. I stored them well and… we’ll see what happens. If they grow, they grow.
If not, heck – it’s effectively a first year garden. I’ll take it.
If you’d like to share, talk to me about your gardens and your hearts. I’d love to hear what your garden – if you have one – is to you. If you don’t have one, is there something holding you back?
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This post made me laugh – that’s something I’d have done with garlic but look how happy they are! I am having my own garden struggles this year. I rented this place because of the yard and the potential for gardening, and it seems like I managed to screw up just about everything related to it.
I started off right by building the beds, getting the soil and planting seedlings… but I planted seedlings too early, so lost most of them because of our late season here and the inability to transplant them before they became too leggy. The second round of seedlings didn’t get the same care as the first – I rushed them into the ground and lost them. We’re in a dry year and I’m not watering enough.
Finally got to spend time today out there with the seedlings that made it, some store-bought starters plants (organic!) and just sowing seeds straight into the ground. So, lettuce, basil, corn, carrots, beans, peas, squash, melons, tomatoes and peppers look pretty good… today. If I can stay up on the watering I might get something come August.
Garden means home to me. I just wish I were better at it, but that impermanence thing is present in my life, too, so maybe I’m trying to plant roots and sabotaging it because I don’t trust it? Dunno. I just hope I get a few good tomatoes this summer. It’s like a sunny little piece of hope growing out there.
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They are super happy – growing like gangbusters!
I think my procrastination may have saved me from your experience with your first set of starts. Our season has been late and cold and there’s a good chance the first bunch wouldn’t have made it anyways.
But it amazes me, how a garden gives us that constant place for renewal, for trying again. For “it didn’t work quite right this time, but maybe in a few weeks… or at the latest, next season.” It’s never really screwed up, just postponed or delayed or not as you expected/hoped.
The watering is a big one for me too! It’s cloudy and it seems like that should mean rain, so I forget to water and then it doesn’t rain. I’m working on getting better about remembering my little plants, especially the ones I have in smaller pots.
Impermanence is a funny thing that way… but I hope your tomatoes are amazing!
Jess just plant the damn seeds. If you move tomorrow so what? If you don’t you’ll have salad.
xo, Annette
Sustainable Eats recently posted..2 1-2 Weeks
Planting seeds! True story – if we move tomorrow, then I’ve had an awesome day playing in the dirt today. And I’ll have salad… if I don’t kill it on accident!