Gardening

I know the photo doesn't match this entry, but I just wanted to share this rainbow. The weather on Saturday was very strange, almost like Hawaii, with brief showers all day. I think there were severe storms just south and we got lucky, always getting the tail end. The day was comfortable but one minute there would be blue sky and the next it would be raining. Toward evening, there was a gorgeous, gigantic rainbow stretching from one horizon to the other. We were watching Alice in Wonderland and it was surreal as the sky went bright yellow and shimmered with light and rain.

But now, to gardens. Today I was doing one of my favorite summer jobs, editing the e-newsletter for Common Ground Garden, the CSA at the monastery. One of the gardeners, Ryan Kutter, is quite philosophical about gardening and writes lovely introductory essays. The production gardener, Ryan Heitland, is a great big teddy bear of a guy, with dreds and an eyebrow ring and a very positive attitude. He writes the more prosaic "life in the garden" column. But this week he captured something that I feel exactly about gardening. The strange thing about the garden is how much you're always looking forward to what's coming next. When something is ripe, it's immediately less interesting than what is yet to come. The cucumbers have already become prosaic, as have the snow peas, and I can hardly wait for the tomatoes, that are coming in much better than last year's wind-ravaged and blight-stricken plants ever did, to ripen. Anyway, here's what Ryan wrote about this time of year at the CSA:

On a different note, the Fourth of July kind of serves as a mid-season marker for our time with the gardeners. Realizing that in just over six weeks the gardeners will be returning to the classroom serves as an almost sobering reminder of the massive harvests that August and September bring. I know it seems strange to be looking so far into the future with all the work that needs to be done now, but it's the vision of the future that keeps us moving throughout this mid-summer heat. We are excited for the beans and zucchini that are new this week, but for us the real excitement lies in what is yet to come, because that is what we are still watching and learning about. And, at least for me, that unending promise is where the excitement in gardening lies.


There's weeding to be done, and the harvest is coming in daily, but I'm excited about the zucchini that are just starting to swell on the vines and the green tomatoes. I'm dying with impatience over the carrots. I'm a little worried the gourds and pumpkins were planted too early, and I wish I'd planted onions and potatoes. But mostly I just feel, even here in the middle of it all, full of expectation of what's to come.