This Year's Garden

So I was out at our garden yesterday, like I am every afternoon when here at home, and I was standing on the dry creek bridge looking out at the 16 rows of veggies and bemoaning the fact that it did not produce well, and is not going to produce well. The corn was a complete bust, as were the red peppers, the scallions, the onions, the green
beans, the radishes, and carrots. How do you botch radishes and carrots for goodness sake? The carrots simply never really came up, while the radish tops flourished but the radishes never materialized into anything more than gangly thin red roots. The hot peppers from Peru, the charapitas, looked great early on, but produced few peppers--simply too hot and dry for them. They may produce in September when the rains come.
This garden was put in with lots of energy by Devon, Valerie Van dePanne, and myself. The soil is good and enhanced with a dozen or more sacks of organic manure. It gets watered daily and was weeded wonderfully, first by Devon and I and then by my daughter Madeleina and her beau Adrian while Devon and I were in Peru. It should have produced wildly.
It didn't. We've had a dozen good cucumbers and there are another half dozen near ready on the four or five cuke plants plus a lot of babies on the way. We've had some wonderful zucchini and yellow squash, huge ones, and there are more to pick, but not many. We have had sweet cherry tomatoes and good beefsteaks, but again, we're talking in the dozens, not the hundreds. And the watermelon and cantaloupe are just starting to show up, while our friends melons are already being eaten. There is some spinach but it's growing in trailers, not bushes, and it's not really wonderful to the taste.
So I was drinking a glass of wine and snorting a bit of the Matses' snuff nü-nü and thinking what a bust the garden was when I unexpectedly found myself chuckling. Of course, I would have loved more produce, but when I've had gardens produce like they should, I have wound up with so much stuff--and at the same time that everyones' gardens are producing--that you can't even give it away to the local churches. I remember pickling more than 60 quarts of cucumbers and hating it. I remember having to carry 30-40 watermelons in the back of my pickup with a sign that said: Help Yourself, They're Free, just to get rid of them. I remember having tomato fights with my sons Marco and Italo because we simply had hundreds of tomatoes we couldn't use or give away.
And when I finished that rhapsody, I lapsed into thinking that the idea of the garden wasn't really all about making food. It was about being around the plants, getting quiet for an hour in the afternoon, enjoying watering them and watching the insects that came into the garden for a taste or three. I mean, I've still got more zucchini and yellow squash than I know what to do with--and yes, I've stuffed it, made a casserole, used it in veggie medleys and still am looking at 15 pounds on the kitchen table with 10 more pounds ready to pick. And we've had cucumbers with lime for dinner several times, had cucumber sandwiches, made cucumber soup and still have nearly a dozen on the kitchen table. And there are tomatoes too, with more on the plants to pick. And enough hot charapita peppers to burn several mouths.
So I decided I should not complain. The garden did its job. It produced enough of a few things to keep me going out there every afternoon to quiet myself. And next year it will probably produce so much that I will be back to cursing the okra and cukes and carrots and radishes as I stand in front of a hot stove in August in Texas, pickling them all.