The Rains Came Down and the Garden Came Up

I am an embarrassment to all of my grandparents, who were farmers. They could grown entire fields full of vegetables, while I struggle to keep a simple house plant from dying of malnutrition.

All winter long, I nursed three poor little tomato plants.  They almost made it.  But I was fooled by an early spring, and put the poor things outside right before a major frost.

In consequence, two of the tomato vines "bought the farm".  None of my pathetic attempts to revive them were sufficient.  The sole remaining vine still retained a hint of green, but it was a sickly green, the kind one gets after lying about in a boat in a storm after having eaten too much of the all-you-can-eat buffet.

We had two broccoli plants which were also sequestered during the long winter months, but I did not put them out during that illusory spring; yet, again, only one of them survived.

I suspect it was the heat that did it in.

In the early spring, Cheryl and I had received two lettuce plants as gifts for attending a gardening seminar down at the local botanical park: one green and one red.  These were doing quite well until the heat wave we recently survived; then they, too, started to show signs of damage.

I was sad and discouraged, thinking that all of my gardening efforts were wasted, and it was time to wash my hands of it and turn it over to someone more qualified (if I could only find someone in the immediate family who had the same level of emotional investment in these poor plants).  Alas, no one was to be found. They all had other things to do.  And the sun was beating down.  And the skies were clear and blue and cloudless.  And it was hot.

Then, all of a sudden, the rains came.  Incidentally enough, they started the afternoon we drove down to Indiana for the family reunion.  And they started a week of storms and rain and water.  And the plants, instead of dying off as I was expecting them to do, grew.

Broccoli

The broccoli is a rather curious type of flora.  I hadn't realized - until we started raising it - that the part we eat is actually the blossoms.  The plant itself is ordinary looking until the little blossoms start appearing on the stem, and it takes a few days for them to really look like the broccoli that shows up on the table.  We only got a few of the blossoms off last year before they got too far in their blossoming and actually turned into cute little flowers (which, I hasten to admit, we did not consume).

Green Lettuce

The lettuce, both the green and red varieties, looked exactly like what I was expecting, back when we received the plants: short and busy and full of fat little leaves.  But after they were planted in our garden, the green one shot up and got really, really skinny; and the red one started turning bizarre colors, a mix of red and brown, which didn't look healthy.  And when the sun hit, the green one all but shriveled up.

Red Lettuce

Oddly enough, the red one didn't seem to be affected, other than the fact that it didn't grow very much.  I finally took the planter box with the lettuce in it and moved it over to the other side of the yard where it has more shade.  They were getting far too much sun.

Cherry Tomato

I had almost given up on the tomato vines, especially after two of them died off; but the third one, although challenged mightily by the heat and sun, pulled through til the rains came in.  And then, in a matter of only a couple days, it turned all green and threw out all kinds of vines and leaves and buds and flowers; and, soon enough, actual cherry tomatoes started showing up!

The most "cheery" (although ironic) item in the garden is the crop of watermelon plants that suddenly appeared.  Back when I was discouraged and thinking it was all going to die on me - and we just happened to be eating a watermelon for dinner that night - I took a bowl full of seeds and dumped it in the garden, thinking there was nothing to be lost by such a pointless gesture.  If they grew, it would be a bonus; and if they never sprouted at all, I wouldn't have lost anything.

But they sprouted.  And I felt my heart leap with joy!  Not because I had my heart set on raising watermelons, though; but just because I was delighted that something green was actually coming up out of the barren dirt where once had been two tomato plants (R.I.P.).

Perhaps there is still hope after all.

Watermelons!