Learning Patience

Someone told me the other day that gardening is the world's slowest performing art form. 

I'm not quite sure given I have seen things like the Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon, but I understand the sentiment.  Last week I was so disheartened.  So many of the plants I had grown from seed and nurtured throughout the spring couldn't handle the sudden heat wave that descended upon New England to close the Spring.  I looked at my almost empty boxes and almost cried.

The chipmunks ate all but two of my squash plantlings.  The heat had killed off all the peppers and some of my tomatoes.  The broccoli had bolted and everything looked empty and sad.

I fell back on two things.  One was a book I used to read my boys when they were little called "Hester in the Wild" by Sandra Boyton.  Hester is a pig that canoes down the river to go camping and loves the hole in her tent that lets her see the stars... until it rains.  She cleverly flips the tent over only to have a bunch of gophers get all excited to find a dry place to party.  She tricks them into leaving, pulls her sleeping bag over the hole, and goes back to sleep, only to have an angry bear awaken her because his friends the gophers are now sad and wet.  He kicks a hole in her canoe.  She is sad, tired, and now there's a hole in her tent and canoe.  So she sits and listens to the river and begins to hum.  She cuts a new hole in the tent to fix the canoe and paddles off into the sunrise.

I was in that "Hester" moment as I've come to call it.  I was standing there in my garden looking at blank spaces, overgrown mugwort along the fences, and just started listening to the birds.  As I listened, I decided to reseed some fast growers.  I put in some radishes and lettuce (and some carrots - which take longer to grow, but that's cool).

I weeded along the fences and just kept working until things were clear again.  Things were still looking empty, so I decided to go to a local farm to see if they had any seedlings left.  It's been tough as this year people are trying to garden.  Our own little community garden is seeing people who have ignored/didn't have time for their plots return and three or four new families come down to start growing things.  It has been a lovely thing to watch grow along with the plants.

I decided to look at what was working.  

My painted lady beans started growing all of a sudden.  I found out they were named for Queen Victoria and how she would paint her face white and her cheeks rouge as the flowers apparently look like her makeup.  I found some more bamboo stakes and planted some scarlet runners, which are teeny tiny right now but popping their sprouty heads out of the soil.

My blue Adirondak potatoes popped up with a lovely bluish-purple center to the plant and I have added the first layer of soil onto them.  The red Adirondaks are popping out too, but they aren't ready for soil yet.

The local farm had some bell peppers left and a couple of tomatoes.  I felt sad seeing them sit there all by themselves, so I took them home with some Thai Basil and filled my tomato box up again.  They also had two good looking mini eggplant bushes and I thought they would be lovely to replace the bolted broccoli.

The corn box has shown growth every day and it makes me smile.  I have no doubt the corn will be "knee-high by the fourth of July" at this point.  The plants' true leaves are growing and the stalks are starting to form on a couple of the plants.  I even noticed that I'm going to have to build some tomato cages and supports from my PVC before long.

Suddenly things looked like a garden again. 

Patience, patience, patience.  That's what it really took, the patience to just sit back and breathe a little and listen to nature as I hummed, planted and paddled off into the sunrise.