Carrots and Cabbage and Beets. Oh My!

I'm still new at this.  It has been 5 years since we moved to the farmstead, turned over a little dirt and started a garden. Perhaps that means we are no longer "beginners" but we remain, by anyone's honest assessment, rank amateurs.  But we are learning.  We have seen enough to know the difference between a squash bug and a Japanese beetle; between a butterfly and a cabbage moth. I can see -- and taste -- the difference between kale, collards and chard.

One might, then, reasonably expect that by this time in the season we might be accompanying the daily transport of heavy harvest baskets from the garden to the kitchen with proud and triumphal whoops of conquest.  The rows are, indeed, exploding with produce. 

- Daily quarts of grape tomatoes augmenting dozens of their full-sized cousins. 
- Armloads of squashes in mixed varieties.
- Peppers, not yet ripe, but dangling like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
- Broccoli, cabbages, collards in their turn.
- For the first time, beets by the bushel.
- And just today, two baskets full of carrots in three beautiful varieties.
- Finally the "promissory notes" of previous investments are coming due, not only with the long-awaited asparagus of earlier in the season, but now blackberries and raspberries in abundance after all these seasons of empty waiting.
- Meanwhile we are baited by the pears still ripening and the apples still coloring, and tricked by the plums already purple but still tart and hard.

To keep up we are cooking, canning, freezing and dehydrating as fast as we can because any kind of waste feels like a death in the family.

But smugness finds no purchase around our cultivated little plot of ground.  Yes, I suppose there is some measure of pride, but our overwhelming reactions are humility and awe.  We take the requisite steps -- we feed the soil, we prepare the spaces, we sow the seeds and water and weed -- but still it feels like a mystery, a wonder, that the earth exudes such abundance. 

All that, and that our dirt-encrusted hands have been privileged to participate in this amazingly common and yet incomprehensible alchemy. Seeds, some so small as to get lost in ones hand; rotted manure; dirt I know intellectually to be teeming with millions -- if not billions -- of microbes and fungi and minerals and worms; sunlight, rainwater, pollinators...

...and time.  All those, and God only knows what else.  And then, as if by magic, a blossom, a bud, and ultimately more, until finally...

...supper.

It seems so utterly and laughably ridiculous on the face of it to crow, with harvest basket in hand, "we did it!" 

God willing, we will be doing this holy work for several more years to come and I anticipate with relative confidence that that will never be our claim.  More likely and no matter how many years we plant and harvest we will still have little comprehension as to how it happens. 

A poverty of comprehension, but a wealth of gratitude amidst the digging and picking for the chance to play some part.