Unintentional Gardening

How can a person garden unintentionally?

Well, the winter has come and gone. June is in full bloom, and I had decided that the garden was going fallow this year. My winter and spring were crazy with children coming and going, the birth of our first grand baby and new business ventures. I took two trips: one in March to see Kai, Seth and Jefri, the other in April to move Sarah back to Oklahoma. All those plans of  getting the garden ready for a well planned spring garden had fallen by the wayside. The weeds had taken over in the garden. I had given up hopes of having a garden at all this year.

Then, I started watching the gardens of my friends on facebook. I moaned,"I don't have time this year. I have classes to teach and lessons to plan. I have 40 hours of work each week on top of that. I try to keep up my ministry opportunities and my relationships require more time than I give." I watched other gardens grow and wished, but pushed it to the back of my mind.. One young friend had started a garden. Her cucumbers needed a trellis. "I have a trellis you can have," I volunteered."I'm not going to use it anyway." The unintentional gardening began.

I ventured into the overgrown garden. Trying not to look and be disgusted at the state of things, I battled the 5-foot tall, gargantuan, prickly plants. Weeds grow very well in healthy soil with no water. The trellis, of course, was in the back corner of all the mess. Courageously I fought with the plants to release the trellis and turned  to escape. Then, I saw it, one scrawny, starving, thirsty, tomato volunteer in one of the raised beds! I didn't even have tomatoes in that bed last year. "Poor thing," I thought. "too bad I'm not gardening this year."

That evening I told Fred that I had braved the garden gate to get the trellis for Amy. He chimed in, "Oh, did you see the tomatoes?"
"Yes," I mumbled.
"Did you see the red one?" he asked.
"There is fruit on that plant?" I asked in amazement. I hadn't looked closely enough to notice any real growth. I felt guilty enough that the weeds had taken over. I didn't want this plant calling to me in the night.
"There sure is. I saw it through the garden fence and started sprinkling it with water now and then. It has a few that are ripening now."

Dropping what I was doing , I bolted out to the garden. Sure enough, buried under the weeds a branch of the lone tomato plant was bearing fruit. Now, I can shrug my shoulders at a volunteer tomato plant that is amongst the weeds. It is actually a weed itself. Once that plant has fruit, however, the story changes in my mind. I couldn't just leave it strangling and alone if it had babies!

So the digging began. Four hours in the garden yesterday afternoon, saw the tomato plant propped up and properly watered along with another that was discovered in a pot buried by the garden gate. One of the raised beds is cleared and ready for planting with drip system installed. All of the gigantic weeds in the raised bed area are cleared and the dahlias that Seth sent last Mothers' Day are in the ground nearby. I hope they come up. They were pretty sad and withered up.

So, the gardening madness has begun, whether I have time or not. I can't abandon the tomatoes that decided to grow in my plot. They want to be there. They want to give me tomatoes. Certainly I must accommodate them.Today I will break all of my gardening rules and go to Home Depot and buy already started plants to put in the other raised bed, zucchini, green beans, peppers and some herbs. Since it is so late in the season and I am not really gardening anyway, I won't feel bad about it. Next year I will start it the right way in spring before the weeds take over.