Moving On

 

This photo was taken more than a week ago, after the first rain we had in more than a month of drought and heat. Rain fell over three days and we netted a blessed 2.5 inches (6.35 cm). When the rain ceased, I spent three days preparing the garden for freezing weather to arrive on the weekend. 

It wasn't going to just fall to 32 degrees F. (0 degrees Celsius) or a little lower. Oh, no. Almost all of the cool season vegetables would survive that without protection. The forecast called for it to drop to 25 degrees (about minus 4 Celsius), and continue going down for a few days.

So I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday picking summer vegetables and covering the cool season ones, hoping to protect them enough that they would survive the warmer weather on the other side. (It won't even freeze tonight.) I picked a lot of lettuce -- there was finally enough to sustain us! It was so beautiful! I then covered it with several layers, hoping beyond hope it would survive the forecast 20 degrees (minus 6.7 Celsius), which turned out to be 18 degrees (almost minus 8 Celsius). I haven't yet uncovered the lettuce. I have a feeling it won't be pretty.

I picked all of the eggplant and peppers that had started to turn color on Friday, planning to pick tomatoes and the still green peppers on Saturday. The low Saturday morning was supposed to be above freezing. Surprise! The temperature was just enough below freezing to kill them off. Oh well, less work for me. I spent two days harvesting cabbage and greens (kale and collards), while my husband cooked them to put in the freezer. Some of the cabbage was later used in making soup and sauerkraut. Some are left to turn into other delicious dishes.

The purple daikon radishes before I covered them against
the coming bitter weather. 

I covered the purple daikons with heavy blankets and plastic (so the blankets wouldn't get wet in rain and snow that was forecast, but failed to arrive).

Sunday morning brought 24 degrees, and Tuesday brought the 18. The gardens pretty much melted. 

I kind of enjoyed the look of disaster in the garden. The reminder of cycles. I was in no hurry to clean things up. 

However, yesterday afternoon (Tuesday) and today my husband went out with the wheelbarrow and tools to clean it up. He can't stand the look of decay. He sawed down the okra plants, some of which looked like small trees, and pulled the peppers and eggplants; chopped down the kale and collards, and cleaned away the remnants of cabbages that I'd left in the garden. He cut down the melted kale and collards, took down the long beans and their trellises, and remove the loofa and malabar vines from the trellises. Wow!!!

The garden is tidy now. Only three tomato plants stand. 

The next week or so will be much warmer. No freezing in sight.

And such is the way of things. We have always had warmer weather after our first freezing night, but "normal" was not with lows of 20 or lower. However, we cannot rely on the old normal. Our new "normal" seems to be unpredictable, too cold too early, warmth coming too soon... then leaving. Drought and deluge.

Climate change isn't coming, it has arrived.

But we keep going on. 

We move on after the freeze... try to figure out how to raise a garden in a new normal that might not settle in to a normal for a while. 

I move on to the next thing. 

Keep moving.

This year I have moved on from a decades long practice.

About 30 years ago I started writing a little gardening column for the newspaper I worked for. It began as a little box in the corner of a page, where I put in gardening information from the Extension -- what to plant now, what other gardening tasks might need done, and so on. Somehow it became more about what I was doing in the garden and evolved into a personal -- sometimes profoundly personal -- column about gardening, more or less. I continued writing it even after I left the newspaper and moved to the next county over, where I offered it to the local newspaper. For the past 15 years, it has been published in two newspapers, then.

And now it is done. 

A couple of months ago, I decided it was time to close that chapter. The column had become a burden, rather than a joy. I listened to a podcast in which they discussed "what do you want to give your energy to?" I decided I no longer wanted to put my energy into that column.

A little more than a week ago I wrote the last one, the finale. I feel a weight lifting, an expansion of my being.

I started doing this blog to supplement the column, because I often had more information than I could fit into the word limit. I could put the extra info in here, for my readers to follow. It never quite worked that way, though, and the blog became its own thing. 

I hope to put the energy that went into my column into this blog now -- part of it, at least.

And I feel that something else is on the horizon.

I keep moving on.

Because standing still isn't an option... not if you want to keep living.