A gardener's heart

I miss gardening. It's hard work if done right. The digging, the hauling the planting, and watering. All of it is beyond me this season. And I admit that summers in Georgia will get to you. I take it in small sips. 

I don't mean growing roses or pansies, that I can manage within limits. I miss growing something you can harvest and use. Planting seeds and bringing something to the kitchen to serve and eat is a special kind of magic. If I lived in a state where it was legal, I would be in ganja glory. There is a weed that takes some coddling. 

My people on both sides grew or peddled produce. Victory gardens were not a wartime novelty. Mom's father sold fruit and vegetable from a cart in the streets of Providence - that's all I know about him. 

My father's family were tenant farmers in Connecticut and ran a roadside produce shed. As a very young child, I was left there in the care of my aunt or uncle. I played in the dirt with potatoes, eating all the freshly picked berries I could hold. I snapped beans and shelled peas with my grandmother before I was in kindergarten. A life in the dirt. 

Tomatoes and broccoli are really all I've ever gotten right. When I showed the boys the two fat stalks of broccoli I managed to wring out of the soil, they ran and hid. Both of them wildly averse to eating vegetables, I gave that struggle up when their pediatrician said, "If they eat some kind of fruit every day, that's good enough."

So I got the broccoli all to myself. Steamed it in a Pyrex bowl in the microwave. Butter, a little salt. Colin yelled, "What's that STINK!". I sat at the table and enjoyed it down to the last morsel. In the bottom of the bowl were three fat, well-poached worms, green as the broccoli had been. No extra charge for the protein.

  

I'm disappointed with the Wood Chip pile Chaos garden out front. My pumpkins accidentally got mowed, The watermelons died from lack of water. I forgot they were out there in the weeds. The balance between perennials and weeds is out of whack. The tall stuff is poke weed. Privet is popping up everywhere and there's plenty of poison ivy and some low creeping stuff that carpets the ground and sticks to you like burrs. The cats won't even hunt in there anymore. I'm tempted to call Jose and order another truckload of wood chips and just bury it all. 

Out back on the dye deck, the dumpster rescues flourish without any attention from me at all besides a good soak if we don't get rain on the fifth day. Lately, it's been every night.

I think this is Bougainvillea. I know it will die if I don't bring it back inside in the fall. Good luck.

This is Swedish ivy on the steroids of the heat and humidity of our summer. 

 My lone tomato plant. Those are about the size of a quarter and I will eat them as they ripen.  One by one.