It’s tempting to only write about the successes in our gardens – Look at me! I’m a Master Gardener and everything always goes right since I’m so smart! Well…(sadly) it doesn’t seem to work like that. At least for me. I jumped the gun (I guess) on sowing seeds in the greenhouse, and now I’ve got sprawling, thigh-high tomato plants that needed to go into the ground two weeks (or more) ago. But neither the weather nor the garden was cooperating. (I’m gonna blame them instead of myself). The garden’s problem was a ridiculously healthy crop of bindweed. So I whipped around on the one warm dry day we had a couple of weeks ago with the Roundup. (Down all you purists; it’s the only thing I’ve found in 30 years that does it for the Canada thistle and bindweed. In three days it’s sugar and water.).
I waited three days then planted six tomatoes. And there they sit. I had tucked them into a semi-sheltered bed but neglected, as I have in other years, to protect them with floating row cover supported, so it doesn’t flatten the plants, by the tomato cages turned on their sides. No, the plants were naked. And there they sat, and sit still. The unplanted ones I’m now taking in and out of the greenhouse on a daily basis. They are flopping over in their second pots, dying to go into the ground. That will happen tomorrow WITH row cover.
Meanwhile, have I learned anything? Like when to seed those babies prior to frost? To force myself to keep repotting them when I misguesstimate? To cover them with floating row cover like the feathers of a mother hen? Maybe, but a gardener’s anxious push toward planting time is like a hormonal rush. Tough to hold back. And then life intervenes. You just have to forgive yourself for not being perfect. Mea culpa. Amen.