Early Gleanings from Sweat-Watered Seeds

We've been cutting lettuce for awhile now – a salad smattering of eight different varieties we planted in large fabric containers on the deck; lettuce, and the trio of radish varieties. Together, as spring’s early arrivals,  they have been functional foretastes of the summertime feast to come.  Jazzed with the miscellaneous herbs sharing the morning sun on the deck we have savored the tender reward for enduring the grocery store winter.  The kale has likewise been a welcomed addition to the stovetop, both the two varieties planted in mid-spring and the row from last fall that resurrected after winter.

In recent days, however, the harvest has kicked it up a notch – a few cucumbers among the three varieties climbing their trellises; squash of four varieties; and cherry tomatoes. Their larger counterparts are swelling and hanging alluringly on the plants, but are yet too green to even consider frying.  We've learned to wait.  The blackberries are ripening, and surely the peppers won't be too far behind, along with the okra and eventually the potatoes, though it remains an enduring mystery what will – or won't – become of the brassicas. 

Just commencing, I realize with a smile, are the weeks that validate all the planning, all the ordering, all the seeding and babying and digging and hoeing:  countertops covered with the morning’s offering; magical lunches and dinners, and eventually steam rattling the lid of the canning pot when the ingathering overwhelms us, and later, that magical “pop” of the lids securing their contents. 

Just now giddily underway, the season of harvest.

It feels a bit that way about our life here on the farm.  Four years ago we left our lovely town home perched on a hill in the city and moved to these acres we christened “Taproot Garden.”  Moving anywhere from anywhere is, I'm convinced, the hardest work in the world, and so our initial endeavors focused largely on homemaking – unpacking, hanging pictures, rearranging, walking around, exploring, living; the usual nesting investments necessary for transforming a living space into a home.  Eventually we expanded our interventions – trimming branches here, removing a tree there; assembling a greenhouse, accumulating some tools and equipment, and finally sowing a few seeds.  In subsequent years we have reached out a little further and dug down a little deeper into this ongoing education; adding, subtracting, experimenting,partnering, reading – always reading something else to learn something more about what we are doing or to explore an idea for we are considering undertaking. 

And it feels like the harvest is beginning. Some of those early seeds are finally fruiting.  Others look promising.  Scattered on the countertops of our souls is a nice and nourishing collection of early pickings.  And it feels good.

None of which, of course, offers any permission to sit back and wait for the ripening.  I, who yet knows almost nothing about what we are doing out here, have already learned that much.  Incalculable hours of weeding are out there in front of us, along with an eye to the sky and a readiness for compensatory watering; that, plus vigilant anticipation of and preparations for  the bugs that are surely on their way.   

We, and the garden, are really just getting started.  Summer, in more ways than one, is still young.

That said, it's nice to start seeing how our sweat has watered the seeds, and to start eating a few of the things we've planted.