Garden Lessons are Life Lessons

It has been quite a calendar year for me. And it has been a memorable garden year too, so far.

With my time split between our home, family, and garden and tending my terminally-ill father who lived 1,300 miles away, I was absent more than ever this year. While I was gone, my garden came down with its own illnesses from lack of attention.

I am realizing so much about being present in my garden this year. I’ve been gone for weeks at a time from the seed starting weeks of February and March all the way through until late July during what is usually my absolute favorite time of the season. It has been very difficult for my and the garden’s well-being. Seedlings had not been tended to my standards, and legginess ensued. Outdoors, pests and disease managed to slip right in under the radar and have slowly but surely gotten the upper hand in more than one crop.

Without my daily, watchful eye, damaging insects made a quick home of our food garden. Without my hourly wandering patrols, eggs were laid and left for good, and ALL the larvae hatched. While I was tending a different kind of garden, the end of my father’s life, spores were spreading among our cucurbits and tomatoes.

After my first summer trip home to care for him, I noticed hints of cucumber disease, an unfortunately familiar sight despite crop rotating annually. After our short trip away the following week, we came back to more disease spreading, this time among our tomatoes. And when I got back from the final and hardest trip of my life, I returned home to potato plants decimated by a large and surely happy population of Colorado Potato Beetles. Meanwhile, our once lush melon plants were nearly dead from disease pressure.

Determinate tomatoes both prevailed amid disease pressure by mid-August. We harvested ample to process, and enough to create holiday novelties too.

This was our year to not fret over disease, because it was not our year for a well-tended garden. It was our year to see what a not-so-well tended garden can produce on the hottest and driest year.

It was a stark reminder that disease must be fretted over. I’ve never considered gardening something we check in on a few times a month, but seeing just how quickly disease progressed and plants deteriorated really cemented further for me the “no vacations in summer” house rule we generally keep. And seeing how fast plants took off and roamed well beyond their allocated space was another benign eyesore I spent some days trying to wrangle upon my return.

Some disease is difficult to manage, but not a complete wash. We kept our cucumbers until late August, and had a hefty supply of cukes that lasted until early September. Our tomatoes have been slowly defoliated by Septoria Leaf Spot, but their productivity was already well on its way; we canned tomatoes a few times a week and felt very homestead-y. There are potatoes to harvest, though yields will be much reduced due to all the defoliation and premature senescence.

Ignoring minor defoliation and not treating at all resulted in the Chinese cabbage recovering quickly, seen here with healthy inner leaves.

Despite the disease, the garden carries on. Some diseases we will be managing for a few years. I am certain the Colorado potato beetle we’ve been so fortunate to live without for years have now established a pretty strong population in our garden — and that will take a few years to find a homeostasis (aka, I hope to fully eradicate them again). We are continuing to hand pick them daily, but I have a suspicion we are not getting them all.

You know the Colorado potato beetles are at home in your garden when they’ve casually been snuggling with your tomatoes.

Crop rotation is one of the many things we will do next year — and we have been doing for our tomatoes. The tomato disease has followed our plants around for what is now the third year, and this is why I strongly believe it was our trellises that harbored the spores overwinter, thus inviting this defoliating disease to spread this summer yet again.

Thanks to the disease pressure, we are taking a serious look at how we clean our trellises this fall. It turns out we never have cleaned off our trellises — ooops! — and I know at least for the cucurbit anthracnose and the tomato septoria leaf spot, both of those can overwinter on trellis material, wood or metal. So some serious garden hygiene is on our fall garden tasks list.

Sometimes you have to lose things to understand the whole picture. Letting things go can often invite reflection that is required to grow and learn in new ways. I appreciate everything the ongoing hardship has taught me about resilience and patience — and most of all, paying attention to what is right in front of you every single day.