Bringing the Garden In

Classes began and I forgot out of necessity that behind the house there were seeds planted that have grown into something useful.  I have to be honest:  this year's garden was difficult to manage.  My north to south layout made it difficult to get between rows let alone find a way into the garden.  (The only entry point is to the east, the other sides flocked by blackberry, fencing, bushes and trolls.  Yeah.  You read right.  Trolls.)  Nora and I found the one place to enter between the tomato rows and would duck under with baskets in hand and lift our heads to a mess of decorative gourd vines and sloppy rows of green beans.  Here's what went wrong:

1.  I cried too much when the seeds went in and the sadness made the seeds shy.  Okay.  Maybe it was actually the heavy rains that hit the day after the seeds went in, so most of my rows were washed away and if you don't have rows, weeding is a real...bother.

2.  The garden was overtaken by a monster vining plant I thought was summer squash and zucchini that turned out to be decorative gourds.  The vines traveled out of the garden, over the fence, onto the sandbox, over the rhubarb, under the car, around the house, down the drive, all the way to my closest neighbor who shot it.  But it didn't die.

3.  Hail.  I don't even have anything funny to say about this.  Mike said the insurance guy estimated an 18% loss.  (Is that right, Mike?)  I'm 18% sure that I'm right.

4.  And you know what?  I still love that garden.  And tomorrow I'm going to get up and thank God again for it and pull up some carrots, harvest some basil, kick and curse the decorative gourd plant and make some plans for next year, plans that include:

Raised beds!

That's right, folks.  I'm about to buy a mess of 2 x 12's, some corner brackets and build myself an honest to goodness raised bed garden.   This won't take care of the hail, but it's going to solve a lot of the problems I've been seeing.

Thank you, God, for second chances.