Tending to the gardens

At the end of the month I am going to get a new and very much more powerful computer! Look for changes to this blog.

Meanwhile I am still spending a couple of hours each day weeding and tweaking the gardens. The vegetables are coming along. No longer will we have to buy the pitiful lettuces picked days ago in California. Our ugli tomatoes are ripening and we have enough eggplant to supply all of Italy. The beans are in blossom and the greens are getting big enough to peel off some leaves. Broccoli is starting to make heads. I have to figure out how to harvest the sweet potatoes that have been growing all the hot summer.

I have heavily mulched everything with the cheapest hay I can buy from the feed store and the cuttings from mowing the grass. I enjoy the many butterflies zooming around as I weed and mulch and water. The colorful monarch caterpillars are busily eating the milkweed that I could not bear to pull up. Their chrysalises hang everywhere. The volunteer zinnias have inserted themselves in every corner of the garden, even in the paths. The butterflies so love them, I can't pull them up just yet. I apply the summer's worth of compost around the plants.

It is still beastly hot so all this activity must happen before mid morning when I could keel over from heat stroke. I vow every day that I will weed and feed the asparagus bed, but so far nothing has happened. I have weeded the rose bed and mulched it with grass cuttings. Tomorrow I will sort out the rampant growth around the lily pond, though I do love the sheer exuberance of all those flowers. The giant mutant cosmos are now eight feet tall and in full bloom.

We put out the bird feeders for the new migrants from the north and all winter we'll enjoy these noisy birds. The hummingbirds have returned to Mexico and we have taken down their feeders. Soon, the chimney swifts will vacate in time for the fall fires we hope to have in the fireplace.

The fall wild flowers are blooming like crazy. I can't identify most of them yet. The wildflower books are no help, so I just enjoy them as we do our two mile morning walk to get the newspaper.

Tending the garden is a lot like the tending I do for family and friends. It takes every day time, a lot of it. This week I reconnected with two wonderful young friends, Hey-soon, and her brother, Jeh-whan. Former students of mine, they are now launched and both engaged in horticulture and solar energy, some of my main interests. And, Laura, my old book editor, now graduated from college and about to launch into-what? And Nick, in high school now on the straight path to something brilliant. I love these young people who come to visit and keep in touch and require things and trade books with me and know I will always have room for them. At times it is exhausting.

Sometimes it feels weird to be so old and to have young people actually want to visit so often. I am not particularly wise or anything, and not of much use to society anymore. Probably I am still fun and I am a good listener and I challenge them. Whatever, I love having them visit and we feel blessed that this peaceable kingdom is a place where people want to come. We tend the gardens.

It's a lot of hard physical work, but also a kind of meditation to tend to your garden. In every way.