Sweet potato success two years ago was two wheelbarrows full. This year, not a one survived, though slips filled two healthy rows at one time in early June. Two years ago, no pears to speak of, in fact only one and a half crops in 4 years. This year, a bumper crop from a single tree that will fill my afternoons for the next week in processing. Peppers one year, tomatoes another, melons everywhere like weeds three years ago, to this year, where are all the damn melons?! I don’t see how the farmers do it. Or, did our farming ancestors count on such extreme variations, whereas today there is an unrealistic reliance on consistency? Hence all the hybrids and GMOs?
I wish I knew. I suppose this has long been the struggle of man and nature that dimwits and intellectuals alike try to grapple with. I read and observe and attempt eternal patience, but in truth it is terribly aggravating all this not-knowing.
It’s baffling and annoying and funny. I try to keep records, but half the time I have no clue why something succeeds or fails, so I don’t know what to record–the temperature and rainfall and seed source and planting dates, ok, but that does not seem to get me very far at all, even when I manage to do it. One year an invasion of squash bugs, another year white flies, another year some unidentified wilt, this year, five different persistent grasses growing like bamboo mats engulfing everything in their path. This has been the most depressing summer for the garden I’ve yet experienced, but I get the sense now I’m repeating that mantra in some form every year.
I get hunches sometimes, for better or worse, and this year I thank the pear success to our beehives. I know timing of the last frost and first good rains fit in there somewhere too, but don’t ask me how. Also failed this year were the figs, one, like sweet potatoes and okra, also failed, were all ones we once called a fail-proof crop for the south.
Back to the drawing board, green thumb. Success in one area, as temporary as it might be, leads to thoughts how to better benefit from such success in future, only in future to find that was quite futile.
If I can get myself past the programming to stop focusing on either success or failure, I might get closer to seeing the bigger picture. Or so they say.
Pear hooch is bubbling happily in the crock. That might be my zooming out solution. One good solution surely leads to another. 🙂
We might need a root cellar. Or then again . . .?
Kensho Homestead 