The Garden, It Will Be GLORIOUS

This year I managed to curb my hereditary SAD (seed acquisition disorder) somewhat better than last year. Considering that both my parents are carriers of this multiple allele trait, this was no small feat.  This disorder is directly related to seeds, so the nerd in me revels in the fact that it is a non-Mendellion inheritance pattern.  My mother’s expresses itself most in her need to give away divided perennials and gather the occasional seed pod to scatter about the yard.  I haven’t lived anywhere long enough to see to what degree I express her pattern, but I certainly have my father’s.

Until we had a family gathering in January my efforts to withstand the siren song of seed catalogs had worked well, but one evening my dad and I sat around the dining table, riffling through the seeds he saved from his vegetable garden while reading aloud possible additions in the seed catalogs that we both happened to have on hand.  We highlighted a few promising entries, bookmarked pages, and made a master list of the ones we couldn’t live without.

BUY ALL THE EGGPLANTS! I haven’t, yet, but this year I will be trying 5 eggplant varieties.

 

It is inevitable that, when 2 or more people with SAD are gathered, there will be a seed swap.

This is one of the best months for kindred spirit gardeners.  We are the gardeners who envision blooming pomegranate trees tucked away in the corners of our zone 5 garden, order sweet potato slips hoping against hope somehow they will defy laws of nature to thrive in our rocky clay soil, and imagine a fantastical folly set off in the distance of our land luring us out for strolls around the property regardless of the fact that we have a postage stamp yard.

I keep meticulous notes of my dreams and rarely refer to them when actually planting anything. Dellabug makes helpful additions with scribbles and doodles with help from her loving daddy.

Yeah, this month, March, it is full of potential.

The failures from last year’s garden are a fading memory easily brushed aside with the reassurance that the weather was not ideal, the grasshoppers particularly voracious, and truly this year will be better.

For a first time vegtable garden, I am bursting with pride with what actually grew last year.

A September morning harvest.

It was not a good year for cucumbers, melons, or squash; the tomatoes, peppers and beans were moderate producers; but the gamble with eggplants was a surprising triumph, the Florence fennel flourished, and the herbs went wild.

Last summer never got hot enough to make the fennel bolt. I left a few plants in the garden, I wonder if anything will come of that.

We have yet to see if any of our children have this hereditary condition, but Dellabug certainly enjoys all things garden.  One of my favorite moments was when she played on the kitchen floor while I was prepping fennel bulbs for the freezer and made a fragrant fennel frond nest.

 

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