The Perilous Garden

I am learning there are rarely gray areas in gardening.  There is either bang or bust.  Brown or Green.  Life or death.  Unlike the ancient ones, I don’t contend with thorns and breaking the hard earth.  I buy dirt in bags.  But gardening has a bounty of bliss that can be dimmed by wicked woes.  Plants that show so much hope in spring can just end up dead.

Our peas died.  It was the first year we had raised peas.  They didn’t spread and vine really well, and I didn’t know I had to be so vigorous in cultivating them, so they tangled together in a big tumbleweed of pods and vines and choked themselves to death.  They were doing so well, too!  So lush and green and then they committed suicide.

Our cilantro has been the one plant that we have been completely unsuccessful growing, and it creates a special wound in our green thumbs because we love Mexican food so much.  This year our cilantro inhibited the bizarre gray area between life and death, growing large stems without many of the leaves we treasure.  It looked like a repeat year, the third year in a row we’d kill off an herb (how pathetic!), but the weak looking cilantro produced many seeds.  We suddenly had enough coriander to top off our spice jar!  Life came abundantly at the brink of death.

All of our gardening is at the brink of death.  There is only one way vegetables grow but seemingly unlimited ways for them to die.  In New Jersey this year tomato plants are catching Irish potato famine for Pete’s sake!  Disease and death are lurking every where.  Yet the vegetables always seem to grow.  And my stomach is always full.  So let us be content.