08.03.09
The dying back of a garden
My garden is dying. It is true, even in the first of what I assume will be the dog-days of August when the fruits of gardening labor should be apparent, mine are not. The garden suffers thusly:
The cucumbers have refused to grow and vine up the trellises I’ve so carefully built and strung for them. While we’ve gotten a few cukes off of them, the yield versus the number of plants I put out is a pittance. There will be no 2009 Aunt Kitty Pickles this year, I’m afraid.
The tomatoes are limp-wristed, pale, spindly, and wither at the slightest glance. Even if I walk past them and try to look from the corner of my eye, they droop and will drop a leaf as if to say, “ooooooooh” and throw the back of a hand up to their forehead in some pre-fainting theater. It should have been obvious that so few blooms equal even less fruit.
The only other vegetable of note are the peppers which I say using the word “stunted” would be aggressive. They are almost knee high when they should be at my waist and while they appear to be a robust verdant shade, I’m wondering if there is even enough juice coursing through their leaves to hold them up against gravity. No worries about needing support cages for these poor things.
My theories about what has happened to my sad, pale plot of dirt comes down to several plausible and probably somewhat connected reasons:
The cold, wet summer of our discontent. This year in upstate New York, zones 4A-5, has been one of the coolest and wettest won record. As a human being of a certain make up and constitution, I’ve found having no 90-degree days and a moderate and tolerable level of humidity to be a surprising delight. Am am not of a beach constitution, do not like to sweat, and cannot find it in my brain (nor my Ohio-born and raised genes) to entertain an afternoon siesta, languishing through the heat and humidity of the day. I find it perfectly hellish and it flattens me into a whiny, complainer that I hate to be around. Also, I’m driven inside and usually end up baking something which heats up the kitchen and provides food which I’m now paying a lot of money to a very nice trainer to tell me not to eat. All that being said, I believe the heat and humidity is exactly what a garden is used too. Sure it might like a good steady rain throughout the week and especially through July and August but there needs to be some sun and heat and this year, there hasn’t been a lot of it.
Have I expended the very limits of my soil’s nutrients? Every year, I enrich the soil of my raised plots with aged compost. I do have limited areas for rotation which I’ve worried somewhat about but there is little I can do with limited space. That being said, adding hundreds of pounds of rich compost to each individual bed should more than make up for heavy feeders…or so the though goes around in my head. But now I’m not sure and will spend most of August research soil refurbishing techniques to try and figure out what I need to do this fall and next spring to zap the beds back to life.
Bees. They’re dying…I send a little money to different places to find out why and hope to turn it around but I can’t say that a dearth of bees in my back yard isn’t distressing me. Even the Lamb’s Ear are typically covered like an undulating carpet of pollen-brushed little buggers but this year, it goes untended.
A Loss of Vision and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike previous years, my heart just wasn’t in the right place for the garden this year. There was no obsessing over seed catalogues and laying awake at night to dream of a dense, moist garden that kindly wound it’s vines around my ankles as I walked through whispering, “This is good, this is good.” There was only desperation as the early spring became late spring and I realized I was going to be working through all summer and fall and would only have short weekends to care and love my garden. Can anything grow without attention? I hurriedly put out a few things but nothing that really made my heart sing or want to spend afternoons weeding and turning over leaves to pick off bugs and whatnot. And now the cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchini, and tomatoes are all dying of powdery mildew and fungus that is rotting them from the inside out.
So I stand on the outside of the fence looking inwards to the neglected beds and think better thoughts for next year. Perhaps a planting of winter wheat to help the soil and the addition of some other natural concoctions that will amend and give back what things might need. And more importantly, I’m going to find the vision again I had for the garden and do a little more and better planning next go around to keep it fresh and alive.
