I am enjoying gardening this year, even though I haven’t blogged about it much.
First off, the weather was so awful this spring that I wondered if anything would survive at the community garden plot! My beans and beets rotted in the ground and my tomatoes were threatening suicide. But prayer, warmer temps, fish fertilizer and two attempts at re-seeding finally paid off.
My garden grows quite well, thank you!
I run to the garden every other day, to water, hoe, thin and weed. I’ve met a few of my fellow gardeners. Most are lovely folks, grounded in the things of the earth. I’ve decided, however, that the guy whose plot is next to mine might be a few beans short of a bushel.
I met him the day I put my first seeds and starts in the ground–way back in April. He and his grandson worked together, breaking up chunks of hard clay soil. He told me he’d never gardened before and thanked me for the bit of advice I offered him.
I didn’t see him again until June. Only his corn was poking up above the lumpy dirt and I watched him dig trenches around the two rows he’d planted.
“Corn needs trench irrigation,” he informed me, grunting as he dug. “An old farmer told me that.”
He was at the garden again this week, turning his healthy crop of weeds under with a spade. He had all three hoses stretched to his plot, filling up the trenches he’d dug around all of his crops.
I asked to use one of the hoses and attached my sprinkler wand to the one closest to my plot. As I watered, he looked on in disapproval.
“You need to irrigate your corn from below,” he reminded me. “Otherwise water will get in the stalks and they’ll rot.”
Growing up in Kansas, I was pretty sure the farmers in my family “irrigated” their corn with rain. And I couldn’t figure out why he was so insistent I was doing it wrong when my corn was twice as tall as his!
“So, where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been farming all my life,” he answered as he shoved the spade into the ground . . .
Sparrow Tracks 