Each Season Different

This year's been an odd one in my garden.  Some of my old stalwarts have struggled, and promising new growth has been unexpectedly stunted.

The butternut squash which flourish with wild abandon most years haven't sprawled across my yard.  Their great glorious golden flowers and fattening fruit have been half of a typical summer's production.  

My okra, now in its third year, are yielding but dwarfish, standing thigh-high where last year they were now already towering over my head.  It might be the heat, and that we're still a bit behind on rain for the year is likely a factor, my regular watering aside.  Or it might be the soil, particularly for the butternut, where the hugelkulture beds that have always shown the greatest production probably needed a refresher of decaying wood prior to the start of the next season.

My trusty bush beans have also struggled, although that's more a factor of my taking an unexpected nine day vacation right as they were starting to produce.  That first wave of beans was missed entirely.  I don't mind that they went to seed, though, because last year's seed crop was devoured by marauding deer...again, when I was on vacation.

Even the sturdy sunflowers seemed slow to get going, although they're now once again feeding pollinators and beaming down beneficently at passers-by.

The majority of my efforts haven't been optimal.  But there are exceptions.

I cut my tomato planting by 60%, as I was convinced that the bed-density of earlier years had contributed to fungal blight.  Only four plants went in, and they've done wonderfully.  Pico de gallo and caprese and bruschetta have been present in abundance lately, and I'm enjoying regular vegetarian BLTs with sweet slices of those homegrown 'maters.  Also abundant: my basil, which started slow but has rebounded, contributing to multiple rounds of pesto and the aforementioned bruschetta, both of which also draw on my copious garlic harvest.

In all of this, I'm reminded that I am just a suburban gardener.  A weak year for me isn't a threat to my livelihood, and it doesn't carry with it the fear of famine.  It's simply a thing to observe and learn from, part of the wild and joyous variety of God's complex and unpredictable creation.  

I Feel It in The Earth

This Monday, my plan had been to begin my spring planting indoors.  I've got two grow-spaces cobbled together in my laundry room, as I took the reflective bubble-wrap from several packages and a pair of inexpensive grow-lights and created creches for my seedlings.  Basil and tomato are the plan, and all of those saved seeds from last year were to go into the soil from my compost piles.

That compost dates back from the leaf-fall the year before last, augmented with twelve months worth of coffee grounds and kitchen leavings, and then mingled up with all of the nitrogen-rich clippings from a long season of mowing.

Every year for the last decade, I've composted, and after two years of adding to it and turning it, that compost has always been...at this point in the season...a dark rich perfection.

But this year, the soil isn't soil.  It's close, but it's not completely broken down.  Large fragments of partially decomposed leaf and grass matter remained undigested by both microorganism and worm, and the resultant looser, mulchy, hay-like substrate isn't likely to work for seed starts.

It seems well enough suited to starting potatoes, and to amend some of my raised beds.  If I leave it for another four or five months, the remainder will likely have fully broken down.  But it's not there yet.

The "why" of that seems simple enough.  As I compost out in the open, rather than in a contained barrel, the historic drought that plagued this region last summer is the most likely culprit.  Though in shade and regularly pitchforked, the pile is exposed to air, and that air was devoid of moisture.  Bone-dry leaves and clippings aren't a happy home for the detritivores on whom the process relies, and so it just didn't quite happen.

I was aware of this likelihood, and probably should have soaked the pile a few times over the summer, but when a region is in drought, "I'm watering my dirt" seems an odd choice, particularly as I tend to leave my ground cover to fend for itself.

Still and all, it's yet another reminder that the systems upon which we rely for life are becoming something rather less amenable to us.  

"For the world," said Treebeard to Galadriel, "is changing."  

And though I am a short-lived human, and not a near-immortal Ent, I can feel it in the earth nonetheless.