Weeding and Reaping

The summer solstice has passed, and summer officially welcomes us.  The new season arrived with thunder, lightning, rain and…cold.  It’s an ironic beginning – the accouterments of summer having baked us dry for weeks – but the unseasonable break was a welcomed exhalation.  We could relax the seemingly continuous irrigation of the garden and the hand watering of the potted flowers that had depleted the rain barrels, at least for a time.

 

We are now well into the first harvest of the season:  weeds.  Having been preoccupied with filling the next row – sowing seeds, transplanting seedlings from the greenhouse, caging and trellising tomatoes – the first rows were left vulnerable.  Reaching the end of the planting and looking back to where we began, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the profligate precociousness of the more native species resident in the soil.  That, coupled with a period of other-focused neglect, the garden is a riot of this and that threatening the viability of all our good intentions.  Grass is choking the chard.  Dandelions hide the okra.  Ragweed towers over the potatoes, giving them full view of the Colorado Potato Beetles that have chosen this moment to nibble at the latter’s leaves.  There is reclamation work to be done.  I know that scripture says, “what you sow is what you reap,” but that is only superficially accurate.  With all due respect to the Apostle Paul, I might amend his truism to say, “what you weed is what you reap.”  

 

Newly refocused, then, we lean in.  Pulling.  Hoeing.  Piling extracted encroachments.  I rediscovered beets yesterday, and curly kale I had forgotten I had planted.  And turnips actually ready to pull.  The initial sowing of carrots is likely lost, choked out by the competition, but there are additional seeds in reserve to which we can now pay more attention.  We often read how “nature abhors bare soil”, but it is always a marvel to witness afresh how many weapons nature keeps in its arsenal.  It’s impressive, even if its effectiveness means constant vigilance and labor.

 

In the end it is a valuable discipline – a reminder that starting is no predictor of finishing; that the giddiness of sowing and harvesting must be matched by the tenacity of tending throughout the season between. 

 

Paying attention.

Observing.

Intervening.

Protecting.

Providing.

Breaking a sweat.

 

Because the gardener who can’t be bothered with the hassle of the hoe won’t be bothered by any happiness of the harvest.