a procrastinator's garden

There is something almost magical about planting a garden. You take some wrinkled seeds out of packets, place them into tilled-up earth and a week later (if you’ve been diligent about watering) little shoots start to appear.

Well, let’s be clear here - if you’re a gardener like me, you wait until the last day you can get the 50 percent discount to order your seeds. After they arrive, you stash the box somewhere out of sight and then remember that you had planned to attempt indoor seedlings - only it’s about a month too late at this point, but you don’t want to waste four varieties of tomatoes and five kinds of peppers, so you plant them anyway. Then, after making a mini-greenhouse in an unused bedroom and barely remembering to water anything, you realize it’s about time to be planting a garden outdoors. Only, then you decide it’s imperative to make yourself some cute little raised beds out of cedar. So you spend a few days building them. And they are cute. But then it rains. And it rains. And your (well-intentioned) plans of getting a garden planted at any time close to what a Minnesota summer will allow for are pretty much gone.

Come June 1st and it’s still not done. Procrastinators do not make good gardeners. But, I digress - back to the magical part of having a vegetable garden. I would love to set up a time-lapse camera for how quickly plants like squash (that were only planted at a certain someone’s request - certainly not mine) will burst up and how slowly my precious cilantro grows. It’s really rather unfair that produce that has little-to-no flavor without adding brown sugar and butter can double its size in a day while this savory herb takes FOREVER.

What is less magical and certainly less charming are the six different kinds of weeds that sprout up right alongside what I’ve cultivated. They have no sense of personal space and just pop in uninvited. Although, I do have to admit that pulling weeds is a bit of a cathartic process - “take that you little water-hogging parasite!”

Gardening is also teaching me patience and helping me to remember the tenth commandment as I see the fruit coming from my parents’ and inlaws’ abundant garden. I look at my beans that have just started to blossom and marvel (okay, I cringe) that they have already harvested a five-gallon bucket.

Thankfully they are blessed with the gift of generosity because they both have shared their produce with us since my paltry efforts at gardening aren’t producing yet. There’s probably a lesson there somewhere, but I’m too busy scarfing down fresh cucumbers and new potatoes to think about it.