Our garden this year started slowly.  We had arranged for a local farmer to till the ground for us in March, but that fell through, and we were at mid-April, the typical last frost time, with a handful of seed packets but without a plowed garden bed.  I’ve read about the no-till garden options, and I wish I would have done that, but I hadn’t, so we were at a standstill.

That is, until our new neighbor offered to come over and till the garden with his workhorse and plow!  I felt like a character in a Wendell Berry novel living in Port William. Even our grandkids got to watch!

Then Hule, our daughter, and I, all took turns the next few weeks planting what we wanted from our seed selections.  I wanted squash and okra.  Hule also planted watermelon and pumpkins.  Sarah planted some of the more exotic and heirloom choices. 

At first there was very little to show for our efforts.  Then there were weeks of drought and hot weather, and we got a sprinkler.  We likely over-watered because our water bill spiked up to over $100 from our typical $44/mo.  There went our “saving money” by having a garden.

But, eventually, and through many hours of Hule’s tending and weeding and laying out landscape cloth, the okra emerged in a nice straight line.  Little baby watermelons came out—some too cute not to be picked and pocketed by our grandson.  Even pumpkins grew!  That has been fun watching the pumpkin vines stretch out into the pasture as they make more and more small orange globes.

But, by far the star of the show has been our summer squash.  Unbeknownst to us, all 3 of the planters had taken on the task of planting hills of squash.  So—we have been inundated with it.  I’ve made fried squash, boiled squash, stir fry squash, and squash casserole.  We’ve brought bags of squash to our daughter in Lexington and to our neighbor.  And, for those “big’uns” (as my grandparents might have said) we created a new compost pile—a pile of crooked neck gold out in the field that, we hope, will eventually become soil again.  Some of the squash went to our 3 chickens, but they are particular and slow to eat it.  If there is any hope of fruit or worms, they turn their beaks up and snub the squash.

Whenever I watch this miraculous unfolding of vine and leaf and fruit from seed, sun, soil, and water, I am taken aback.  When the small green striped orb in my grandson’s hand becomes as big as his torso in just a few short weeks, and develops into something enough to satisfy several families at a picnic, I am in awe.  When I look at the gorgeous yellow and purple blossoms on the okra stalks morph into green edible pods and the gigantic orange squash blossoms birth cute baby yellow vegetables overnight, I am mesmerized.

The garden becomes a sanctuary.

It all reminds me of a quote—one of my favorite—from Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays:

“…outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.”