Things Here and Things To Come

Well, at least I’m sticking to monthly updates.

The few corn stalks are starting to tassel out. We should have at least one meal of our own corn. The beans are blooming–they have lovely purple blossoms. The cucumbers are beginning to set and we should harvest those in a few weeks. The greens are pretty much gone bitter and I have given up on them. We ate the carrots and the beets. Both very yummy–I loved the dragon carrots with their purple outsides and yellow insides. We should have planted more. The tomatoes are starting to ripen, especially the grape tomatoes which are doing wonderfully.

In bigger news, though, we’re hoping to sell the house and move across the country, back to my home state of Washington. That makes this blog sort of pointless as a journal to help me garden, but it’s still a piece of my life I’m glad to have recorded. I don’t know what or how I’ll be gardening in the next few years–we may stay with family for awhile, we may have an apartment. I will at least be participating in the massive gardens my family has in some capacity, even if its only taking extra produce off people’s hands. If we are in an apartment, I’ll probably try to make a serious effort at container gardening finally.

We aren’t sure when we’ll actually want to own a house and land again. The maintenance is a lot for us at this stage of our life. When the kids are big enough to help instead of hinder, when we’re more sure where we want to go and what we want to do–maybe then we’ll be ready to do it again.

But working to get things ready for sale makes me realize how much the way I want to garden depends on continuity, which in turn depends on ownership. As long as it was my land, I could do things the slow way. Wait for compost. Weed by hand with mixed success. Leave the green stuff growing in the corners. Cultivate perennials to gradually fill in the bare spots. Mulch with whatever came to hand.

Now that we’re trying to sell, I have to conform to what’s expected. And that means doing it the fast way, slash-and-burn. Weedkiller, cheap annuals, beauty bark. We’ve been told we can leave the vegetable garden for now, and hopefully the compost pile, but I’ll have to stop adding to keep the smell at bay. (I suppose I could try to keep all the beds around the house hand-weeded, but I simply don’t have the energy and time at this stage in life to do that AND keep the house in show-perfect condition AND keep all the children alive and fed.)

It would be nice if whoever buys the house actually wants the compost pile and the trenches in the vegetable garden, but I suppose the chances are pretty slim. So, although we are excited about the move and future changes, there’s a bit of regret for what will be uprooted here.