The Garden In June

Now that it's June, the garden plot that in April that was a desolate patch brown dirt and red clay is now a teeming sea of green!

Potatoes in sunshine

Potato plants three feet tall, tomato plants taller still, and laden with fruit, thrive. There are beans and peppers. Squash and asparagus. It is all very rewarding.

But the reward comes only partially comes from the success of growing things.

Perhaps a deeper reward derives from a mystical sense of being one with the garden.

Jerry Garcia remarked after  concert that it was not the band that played the music but the music  that played the band.

And so I think it is  with gardening. The garden works its own magic. I know almost nothing about gardening but somehow when I am working in it it is the garden that tells me what to do. For a few hours I am at one not only with the plants and soil but with the universe.

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Potatoes fresh from the earth

I dug up a few potatoes yesterday. It's early, and the plants still have a way to go, but the results are promising. To the right, my harvest from two plants.

We've been lucky. There has been abundant rain and enough sunshine to make things happen. Still it seems a miracle. The magic of nature bestowing gifts,

We fool ourselves if we think we play any  more than a handyman's roll. Water from the sky falls to the earth, goes into the ground, and magic happens. Beautiful things that did exist — hundred of pounds of them — are miraculously created while we stand on the sidelines in awe. It is truly amazing. And how beautiful. Tiny tomato seeds become huge plants five feet tall and more weighted with ripening fruit. Again it is not our doing.

Tomatoes on the vine 

Sure, we help things along.

But that's what we are here for. And not just for gardens but to help each other.

What the garden teaches with its dirt and soil and microbes and worms, nutrients and moisture, minerals and compost, weeds and bugs, is interdependence.

For a while, working and weeding, digging and planting, I am not the gardener. I become the garden.