I don’t know about you, but my mail box has been flooded with seed catalogues. Each one has glossy, color photos of stunning summer vegetables and flowers – the sole intent to seduce.
“Look at the beautiful carrots (beets, corn, eggplant, beans, tomatoes, chard, okra, tomatillos, pumpkins, squash, etc, etc)! You know you want to grow these! Picture the beautiful garden! Picture yourself, lovingly tending this lovely, summer paradise!”
Uh huh.
I love the *idea* of gardening. I love the planning of a garden. Pouring over seed catalogues, picking out what to grow and how to arrange it so that each plant is beneficial to the other. Visiting the local nursery, picking out heirloom varieties of tomatoes.
I love the *idea* of walking out to the garden in the summer and picking fresh, ripe veggies for dinner.
I love the *idea* of looking over my flourishing garden and sighing with pleasure.
What I don’t like, is the reality of gardening. The daily watering and the never ending battle with weeds and gophers and bugs. Especially the squash bugs – nasty suckers.
Our first year on the farm, we went a little crazy planting a LARGE garden with every type of seed bought from above mentioned catalogues. It became practically another full time job maintaining the garden, and by the end of the summer we had so many tomatoes (and squash, and corn, and peppers) that we were begging perfect strangers, “Please, do you you need any veggies?! I’ll bag them for you!”
Almost eight years later, we’ve gotten a little wiser. We still plant a few things in the garden, but we limit ourselves to just a few seedlings from the local nursery – and happily take the neighbor’s extra tomatoes and squash.
Random Acts of Creativity 