We finally got the ground tilled up and ready for the vegetable garden. If weather permits and all of the planning falls into place, we should have a bountiful harvest.
My next endeavor will be to learn how to can, which in today's world is really to "jar" because the cans are now only found on the shelves. I'm not sure how that once took place back in the day when milk was left on people's doorstep in bottles.
Nevertheless, our nine long rows are planted and as each year before, the competition begins of who knows the most about gardening between my husband and me.
Some years he wins and others I do. One year he demanded we fertilize twice instead of once and sure enough the plants burned up. One year I designed where we placed the plants, and we had green squash and yellow cucumbers. This year he took half of the rows, and I took the other half.
He had this well laid out plan of digging a hole, trickling in some fertilizer, putting in a handful of Miracle Grow soil and then the seeds and then the dirt. And as long as it just took you to read that it took us ten times longer to plant three seeds. Needless to say, my ADHD brain was incapable of continuing with this plan. And before long beans were everywhere, but most were planted.
He continued to fuss that my seeds were not deep enough and would be washed away. I told him his were too deep and would not come up. My rows were planted in less than half the time his were, but we were still able to get them all in before the huge rain storms swept through. It was a mutual decision this year that we would not spend the extra money buying plants but go with only seeds instead. Both of us are waiting to see the results of this choice.
After a week my rows began to pop up quickly. My husband continued to argue that even though mine came up first the roots would not grow deep enough to withstand the coming rain and the reason it took his so much longer was because this would not be a problem with the roots. A week later his cucumbers and squash did begin to surface and little batches of green are now spotted across the fertile brown rows.
The Garden has been a part of mankind literally since the beginning. It was in The Garden man made his first mistake in taking of the forbidden fruit, and since then man has toiled in The Garden. Many refer to their flowerbeds as their garden. Others design elaborate beds to create butterfly gardens so that these flying beauties bring more color than the actual flowers which bloom.
My grandmother had a cactus garden, and I found when we traveled out west that some actually have strangely arranged rock gardens. But my husband and I both grew up with fruit trees and vegetable gardens. We spent many hours as children snapping beans and shelling peas, picking corn and tomatoes, and eating for dinner what was earlier growing in the back yard. The annual competition is simply due to being married to an athlete. Everything has a challenge and our outcome is seldom ever discussed by the time weeding, harvesting and cooking takes over.
Regardless of how one chooses to garden, the toiling to us has always been one of the most enjoyable aspects of the process. And I feel for those who have never had the experience of tasting the unique sweetness of eating what has been fresh picked as opposed to what sat on a shelf for days. So may the competitions in the Foreman house continue!
(A small secret learned from my many years in Bible School…beans always pop up first) He was playing on the ballfield while I was learning this with a Styrofoam cup.)
