Everything is not in our control.
As in all things in our life, we would like to have complete control. We have become a society that doesn’t deal well with surprises. Giving up control can be be crushing or humbling depending on the situation. When I had cancer, I had to give up a lot of things that I “Controlled” and give them over to my husband. Things like the bills, being the primary caregiver for our daughter, the cooking and cleaning. All these things became his responsibility. When it came to my treatments, my doctors had control over the medications, my appointment schedule and what felt like my life for 19 months. Thankfully I am now cancer free and back at the helm of my ship so to speak. Accept the bills, he kept those and I am good with that.
As farmers and gardeners, we are trying to take over control of an environment and make it bend to our will and design. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. When I’m in the garden alone, either planting, weeding or harvesting, I find myself often thinking about how farmers did things without all the bells and whistles we have today. Before the invention of the motor, farmers used horses and mules to pull plows and till the land. Then sow their seed by hand and pray for rain. There was no watering systems like we have today, no weather radar and certainly no air conditioned tractors to till acres of land in just a day.
As a child, I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie. I had read all the books and the show was filmed in my home town of Simi Valley, CA. There is one episode I always think about when the Thunderstorms role in here in South Carolina. It’s called the “100 mile walk”. In this episode, a sever hail storm destroys the crops and the farmers are forced to find work in a quarry. How hard life as a farmer must have been back then. Not that today’s farmers and gardeners aren’t subject to Mother Natures wrath today, but we are able to over come some of the obstacles that they couldn’t.
This past 2 weeks we have had amazing weather here. While we’ve had lots of rain that delayed some gardening projects, the temps have been great. I even got my “farmers tan” back. I was able to get the new rose garden planted and get the weed cloth down in the cut garden. All 300 sq ft. I have seedlings and tubers that are desperate to go in the ground, but this week, “SURPRISE”, Sweet Mother Nature threw us a curve ball. Our evening and overnight temps have dropped back down to freezing!
We quickly collected as many buckets as we could find to cover the new and transplanted roses. We got the row covering out to cover the newly sprouting peonies in the cut garden. Pots of tropical banana trees, plumeria and pomegranate trees were brought in from the pool deck where they had been enjoying the sun and warm temps. We took a risk and didn’t cover the peach, plum and pear trees. Had we lost those blossoms,it would’ve been three years in a row without fruit. But to my surprise and great delight, they survived and are beautiful.
These cooler temps have put a kink in the hardening off process for our seedlings and over wintered plants, but Spring is finally here and it won’t be long before we see the gardens in full bloom and hear the tractor humming in the hay pastures.
Happy Gardening from our Garden to Yours.
