Taking Advantage of Perfection

We had been waiting for the perfect day.  In truth, what we needed was merely a functional one.  Rain has been such a constant feature of this developing spring that garden work has been difficult to advance.  We've had plenty of opportunity to wear the mud boots; not so much the tiller and the hoes.  It isn't that the sun has never made an appearance, just seldom enough sequentially to dry the ground.  Time was moving deeper into the season and I was growing restless, waiting. 

But as has been said about nausea, you can delay matters but eventually the moment is going to come. Sooner rather than later we would need to give up waiting. 

But yesterday functionality and near-perfection blessedly converged.  While Lori weeded among the thicket that had become the garlic beds, I readied planting spaces -- tilling, composting, broadforking.  And then last evening, after catching our breath, we planted.  

Seeds. 
Sixteen rows of them.
Green beans.
Okra (3 varieties).
Onions (2 varieties).
Beets.
Red kale.
Swiss chard.
Collard greens.
Fingerling potatoes.
Zucchini.
Patty Pan squash.
Blackeyed peas.
Pinkeyed peas.
Christmas Lima beans.

There are, of course, more seeds still languishing in their packages -- the peas and cucumbers for which trellises will yet need to be installed, and flower seeds, the inevitable afterthoughts intended for miscellaneous patches around the farmstead.  Those, along with all the transplants shaking the bars of their greenhouse prison aching for a work-release by which they can breathe deeply and sink their roots into garden soil toward a new stage of productivity -- the tomatoes and peppers and cabbages and yet more onions.  And four more fruit trees were delivered yesterday.  But all that will require more stretches of sunny hours during which the remaining section of the garden can be prepared to receive new residents.  

But the morning started out with fresh showers -- a blessing for yesterday's newly ensconced seeds, but a challenge for fresh dirt work.  And there is more rain in the extended forecast.  The sun, though, has emerged with the prospect of more throughout the day.  Sufficient drying may yet occur.  We’ll see.  

In the meantime, I'll give thanks for yesterday's “perfect day” and, as with every other part of living in actual reality, divine creative strategies for accomplishing our goals amidst days a notch or two below perfection.