Veggie Tales
I'm gonna go ahead and call it: The tomatoes are a bust.
It’s been close to three months and to date my yield remains three still-very-green tomatoes from one of six plants that produced ample yellow flowers but no fruit.
My peppers are doing better, but only one has turned the promised color on the plant card; the rest remain stubbornly green and several are now mottled.
So goes my first foray into my urban victory garden. Pretty plants, I can grow. But functional ones, not so much. Part of the problem may be the containers—too shallow to support the stakes I bought for the plants’ support. I think the soil is OK, but that will be determined once I’m brave enough to bite into my bounty. I also am no longer sure creating this container garden on my second-story walkout worked. Our local bees must have lost their invitation to the pollination party. I thought the plants were self-pollinating, but if that’s the case, they should have been way more unrestrained in that role.
It’s also a bit more work when you can’t just run a hose over each area nightly. I have to make numerous trips to the bathroom to fill up jugs to saturate soil fed every three to four weeks with Miracle Gro.
This horticultural adventure got off to a rough start. By the time I decided to create my garden in mid-April, seeds could not be found. Everyone wanted them, I guess. I went to the gardening section of a large department store and swooped up the last remaining beefsteak tomato and red pepper plants. Perhaps other shoppers knew something I didn’t.
Regardless, I’ll continue experimenting with homegrown vegetables just as I have making my own yogurt and yeast rolls and ice cream to help compensate for the lack of travel, family gatherings and outdoor adventures this summer.
The pandemic has given many of us something we didn’t realize we’d lost and desperately needed: time. We complained constantly about being too busy, when really, we now know we just prioritized different things. We involved too many people in plans or placed too many plans on people. We outsourced a lot of tasks that we now must do for ourselves. And we repeatedly failed to take quality time for ourselves, now realizing those timeouts are what sustain us.
There are still many things out of our control and still great debate about how we got here, with my state rolling back its reopening yesterday to deal with a surge in COVID cases. One thing is for sure: We’ve living through more than one reckoning. Nature is finally wielding some might, forcing us humans into retreat as the environment soothes and heals from wounds we've long inflicted through our pollution, overpopulation and politics.
We need to respect what’s happening and dig deeper into how we got here. Because Mother Earth is laying it down and demanding more respect, whether it’s through a potentially lethal virus that outperforms expectations or home gardens that fail to deliver.
