Daily Gardening Chores

The photo above shows plants of squash, tomato, garlic, onions, and calendula in a small garden bed. The open spot had cilantro that went by so I uprooted them and planted lettuce there. Once I put up some shade for the lettuce I hope to get some fall lettuce from this planting. This successional planting is important in gardening if we want to make the best use of our garden space and keep all of our garden productive.

Gardening in July really consists of balance. A balance between gardening, harvesting, and using what you grow. As the summer garden chugs along it's fun to let the garden direct that balance. Plan on spending an hour working compost into the soil but notice that the raspberries are so ripe that their canes are hanging to the ground? Sounds like the garden is calling to have those raspberries picked! Having delicious fresh food is the reason for the garden after all. The compost will be there later, come back to it. It appears now is the time to harvest and enjoy raspberries.

On most summer days a walk into the garden will reveal what daily tending needs to be done. There are times when I go to the garden with a "to do" list and I stay in the garden and follow that list until it's done. Other days I have no idea what will need to be done because I think I did it all the day before. But a walk in the garden reveals some weeds that need to be pulled, a patch that needs some compost and/or mulch, some thinning that needs to be done, some watering, some staking that is needed, some dead heading... on and on the list may go. Some chores that are important to keep up with is that of compost making and spreading as well as watering and mulching and weeding. When in doubt do those things. If they are done then do the next most important thing. Pick some flowers or herbs that smell pretty, sit down in a nice spot, and just enjoy your garden.

Remember, your garden helps make the world clean and fresh. Sometimes it's easy to focus on what may be going wrong in the garden because let's be real, things always go wrong in the garden. That's a given. There is no perfection in life. A better way to go is to focus on what is going right in the garden because let's be real, things always go right in the garden too. We learn what to do right by learning from what went wrong. So the "wrong" in the garden is there to teach us to do it differently next time and if you're a gardener there will be a next time.

Ok, I'll fess up with my test of this philosophy. I went out to harvest the peas that I tried to add more stakes to support yesterday but it didn't work. I told myself that it didn't matter and I would focus on all the luscious peas. Remember that? Well as I was hunched over rather than reaching up to pick peas that thinking was really, really challenged because I really wanted to focus on how I screwed up the pea planting this year. You don't, after all, bend over to pick peas!! Then I thought about how I was picking enough peas to last my family quite a while and enough peas to donate to the local homeless shelter. So the question really was, "Who cares if you're bending over harvesting peas! Certainly the kids in the homeless shelter don't care. Your family doesn't care. Only you care." Well with that little chat going on in my head now finished I realized that the important thing was, "We had PEAS!"
-My peas all bent over. You can see some that are still upright at the end by the post-

So enjoy your garden no matter how successful or how challenged it may be,
Mary