Prep: Letting Go + Starting Over

*Upper garden with kale, broccoli, leeks, and swiss chard.*

The mountains around us are topped with snow. It’s a signal for me that it’s time to let go of previous gardening season and prepare for the next. The to do list before the first real freeze goes something like this:

Clean out beds and finish harvesting and processing vegetables (today I had to harvest a bunch of celery, chop, wash, and freeze it and we’re leaving a few stragglers in the garden like kale and broccoli to see how long they can survive)
Add cardboard to any areas that I didn’t properly manage the weeds
Top beds with new compost
Top paths with new wood chips
Plant seedlings in greenhouse for winter greens
Plant garlic cloves for next year’s harvest
Pour a cup of tea and sit back and relax
Hibernate

We’re almost there. Just topping a few more beds with compost and we’re ready for that cup of tea. My current favorite is red clover and dandelion. YUM. Add that to your harvesting list for next year, trust me.

*Lower garden, playground, and soon-to-be sauna that my husband is building.*

To be honest this year’s garden didn’t go as I’d hoped. I had drawn up big plans and my to-do list was extensive. I envisioned a root cellar full of homemade and home-preserved goodies. I imagined the pride I’d feel taking each jar of pickled zucchini out for a Winter treat. I did my best, I think. We have a few jars of things and a bunch of frozen berries, but I’d grade this year as a solid C in terms of productivity. The truth is I had a tough year and the weather absolutely did not cooperate, but mostly, I had a tough year. We had so much intense rain that kept me out of the garden and sort of killed my spirit. Finally when this beautiful and unseasonably warm Autumn hit, the world erupted into chaos and my grief took hold. I had a hard time motivating myself to do much of anything besides read each and every headline.

Slowly but surely I managed to do a little work every few days, and with the help of my husband and my girls, we worked through most of that list above. Cleaning out the garden means reliving each success and failure. I tend to focus a lot more on the failures in life as a rule, so I beat myself up for everything I let bolt or over ripen. But dwelling on such things doesn’t really get us anywhere, I told myself. So I tossed it all in the compost pile and raked over the evidence.

*A closer look at the upper garden on this beautiful day.*

Now things are looking fresh and ready for a new, re-energized effort. That’s the thing about gardening. You just keep trying year after year to get it right. You don’t lose hope. You don’t lose faith. You just try again with another seed, another technique, another planting time, and you hope for the best. Last year, I lost 2/3 of my garlic harvest because of this annoying little fly that lays eggs in alliums (onions, leeks, and garlic) and then the larvae eat the plant and stunt its growth and its ability to cure for the Winter. I was angry and disheartened and said there’s no point to even trying to grow garlic ever again and that’s that.

But of course today I found myself gingerly tucking garlic cloves deep into the soil and covering them up with soil and a prayer. I don’t know if the onion fly will be back again. It probably will, but I’ll keep trying anyways. We can’t give up can we? No matter how bleak things look or how disconnected we feel from reality, we have to keep putting one step in front of the other and one seed in the soil. Another life lesson from the garden.