Gardens

I love gardens and forests and fresh grass and ivy-covered walls and evergreens and meadow-places thick with overgrown grasses and tangled wildflowers, and in fact anything green and growing and lush. This is no doubt partly because I have lived all my life in a desert, which is a brown-beige almost everywhere you look and almost all year around. But however it came about, my love of green and growing things amounts to such a craving that every year in (roughly) late February, I start having dreams that are overgrown with vine and leaf and branch. When this lush imagination-riot descends, I know that it is time to start planting. I have had a garden of sorts for a few years - for vegetables and flowers and usually weeds, since I always feel guilty pulling up anything at all.*

It is easier and more effective to grow things in pots with controlled (and store-bought) soil, rather than directly in the ground - for our local soil is pathetic. But I try nonetheless, and since my house has a large yard I have plots everywhere, supplemented and augmented a little bit at a time over the years. My gardening is very haphazard! County extension people, professional gardeners, and Sam Gamgees everywhere would be shocked.

And, living in a desert where drought is more the habit than a mood and water is precious, it's hard to keep everything wet enough. So, I've drafted my family into extreme water conservation: We save bath and shower water, dishes and vegetable rinsing water, and anything else possible. This means lugging gallons every day - which must be good exercise at least. I have a lovely family!

But this year, with lot's of family-help, some rain, and God's blessing, my garden is the lushest and greenest it has ever been! So far, it has not produced much in the way of edibles, but the sight of it is enough to satisfy every desert-dazzled craving:

Pots: Tomatoes and wee little green beans coming along nicely!

 

Plots: Further green beans with, alas, rather wilted acorn squash leaves in the background. But that's all right! They perk up again past the heat of the day.

Plots (of a garden variety): Basil and tomatoes, still young and tender and rather unlikely to produce much fruit unless I find a way to fertilize them. I've heard good things of Epsom salts...

Plots: By way of contrast, this is how my garden usually looks. But it's a new plot and hasn't had time to ruminate.

A flower! I don't remember what kind this is, because I put a whole lot of seeds in this plot (including some that are years old) on the theory that very few would come up. I think they all did.

Pots: Green tomatoes! Their so cute! Grow, you little beasts!

Plots: Pumpkins, I think, and tomatoes. I didn't actually plant pumpkins here; whatever they are, they came up on their own. But they're happy, so I leave them!*

And there you have it. Not a complete tour - I also have herbs and sunflowers and zucchini and onions and garlic and turnips (I think) and roses and alyssum and grapes. I am in heaven!!!
(Did you know that the word "paradise" is a loanword from Persian, and means something like "garden"? Pretty awesome. "Persia" itself is named after the same thing, and "Farsi," the Persian and now Iranian language, comes from the same root also.)





*My Theory of Weeds: Let them grow! They hold down the sand when the spring winds come; and they make good compost, if you take care of them before they form seeds.
The exception to this rule, of course, comes with all weeds that are pokey or thorny or sticker-y. I take after our father Adam in this way.
Another exception might come into play when (not if) I move someplace that isn't a desert. I hear that things actually grow in such places without much encouragement.