I almost lost my tomatoes due to meddlement because I am a fiddling fool who cannot stop fussing and tweaking and picking at things that do better when left mostly alone. Seeds in soil know how to grow, but I am the gardener who shouts, “Grow!” and then proceeds to burn the seedlings with fertilizer….
Tag: Gardening
One Ripe Tomato
I’m afraid of this, as I am of many things. First, I think of the work. Then, the possibility of failure. I know the routine. Pour the soil into a bucket and get it to take water. When it holds, scoop it into pots and decide how many seeds of each thing to plant. But…
Soil, Paper, and Patience
Gardening, while pleasurable in itself, is a means to an end, while writing is often an end it itself, and finishing a project feels like putting the garden to bed without putting any food by.
Hunger Moon
I don’t know what I’ll do today. Not exactly, but it will have something in common with this restless season, restless because we’re still chained to winter, because we don’t know the exact moment the ground will thaw.
That February Feeling
This morning, as I was walking to work, I heard something distinctly springy: birdsongs that were not house sparrows, our perpetual feathered companions. I thought they might have been warblers, scouting the cottonwoods along the banks of the Clark Fork.
The first snow
The garden is gone. Or rather, the garden is changed. My first thought is sadness, and my second is gratitude. I’ve been thinking a lot about how gardening has saved us, yet again. We have food. We have beauty. And it’s kept us from despair. During these months of the pandemic, we focused on our…
