Gardening Joys

It's going to be a beautiful day out there in the TN sunshine.

My little garden is coming along beautifully, as I finally found two Brandywine tomatoes at Lowes last week. The raised bed is now officially "full," with no more room for plants. (Well, if something really grabbed me, I suppose I could find a place to tuck it in, but just one)! One benefit of the bed is that it actually encourages me to weed. Because it is so compact, it is easy to pluck out the offenders who spoil the symmetry of the whole.

Bill has always been dismayed by my lack of enthusiasm about weeding. When we had a huge family garden each summer in New York, my philosophy was to plant everything (a monster task in itself) and let nature battle it out unassisted--the strongest would survive. In any case, I wasn't about to stand out there in the heat and bugs and pull weeds all day, everyday. This is how our yard became an overgrown mess. Going out to pick produce was a scavenger hunt of epic proportions, and occasionally, I came face to face with a woodchuck (or groundhog, as they call them here) who was also there to harvest the vegetables, and scaring the bejabbers out of me. We got plenty for the family table and canning pot each year (though probably not as much as we would have, if the plants weren't competing with the weeds), but I didn't worry about it. The stress-free garden. At least I didn't have to weed. And I felt completely guiltless about it too.

Maybe I'm getting older and more persnickety, maybe more orderly and responsible, but now I just weed my little patch without complaint or drama. I hum while I'm out there, and dream about fried okra and BLTs for breakfast. My own sweet pickle relish lined up in the pantry in sparkly glass bottles. Kosher dills with fat cloves of garlic in the bottom of the jars. Ziplocks of baby beans and peas, stacked up in my freezer.

Harvest time will probably bring much complaining and sweating and bug-bite slapping, but for now, tending my garden patch just gives me unadulterated joy at basking in the sunshine and contemplating the promise of produce to come.