The Abundant Garden

    Amid the worry and uncertainty of the newest wave of the pandemic reaching our shores, I am finding that spending time in the garden is the best balm for my anxiety. Here we are in late Summer and the garden is feeling abundant, overflowing. It's hard to feel too anxious in the middle of it all. I have reached peak bean production, and am once again amazed by what volume of beans can be grown on one meter of trellis. The new metal trellis poles are holding up but the chicken wire wasn't fixed firmly enough and is now bent over double at the top under the weight of it all.

The overloaded bean trellis

   My cherry tomatoes are picking up steam and I'm about to harvest my third big, beautiful monster zucchini. The Mystery Tomatoes have set fruit and I'm very curious what they are going to be like. They look to be full sized varieties, not cherries.

   I want to give you a little update on the sunflowers. Just a few days after my last post about the sunflower holding hands with the peas, I came out one morning to this:

   It wasn't even a windy day; it seemed that a bit of rot had started halfway up the stock for some reason. I cut the flower and brought it inside so I could at least enjoy its beauty. It looked very pretty in an old blue glass bottle. And then I waited. A couple weeks later, it was clear the plant was working on little side shoots, putting out flower buds to replace the one it lost. The largest one shot up surprisingly tall, and then a flower bloomed, as beautiful as the last one:

   In this photo I managed to catch a honey bee and a bumblebee busy at work. In theory this is the whole reason to plant sunflowers in your veggie bed. The tall, bright yellow flowers are like big signs advertising a nice place for bees to come for a visit. "Come for the sunflowers, stay to pollenate my pumpkins."

   You could say gardening helps my anxiety because it is a distraction. The art of paying attention, following the drama playing out among the flowers and the pollinators. But it's more than that. For one thing it puts me directly into the moment like very few things do. Gardening engages all the senses. I could grow tomatoes for the scent alone; likewise all of my herbs. In fact every plant has a smell it releases as you work. I feel the dazzling force of the sun on my shoulders or the way the breeze picks up before the rain. It is also a reminder that so much is going on around us that is outside the realm of human concerns, and these things have value; we can even find inspiration from them. It is not just the sunflowers. I witness the resilience of plants every day in the garden, in so many little ways. People think of plants as static, sedentary things, but if you pay attention, they are responding and adapting to their environment every single day, just like us.