Beautiful Bounty

If you don't believe in God, grow a garden.

I had a really fun time growing a garden this year, because it was the first time I had ever done it by myself.  Well, almost by myself.  Bhakta Jon helped a lot, especially with digging, tilling and weeding (thank you, Bhakta Jon!), and Kamalini and Bhadra helped with tilling, weeding, rock-picking and watering as well as harvesting.

This summer yielded a glorious bounty of yellow crookneck squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, okra, and a whole bunch of adorably cute baby potatoes!  This week, we harvested our sweet potatoes.  Woo-hoo!

Sweet Potatoes!

It was a lot of hard work getting the ground weeded, tilled, fertilized and loamy-fied for the planting.  We have three square-foot garden plots built out of North Carolina fieldstone by my good husband. 

My husband has always been the one who grows gardens at our house.  A couple years back, my husband commented, "I haven't seen that you are very enthusiastic about gardening."  Oh YEAH????  I thought, I'll show him!

So when he left for India in the middle of May--even though it was rather late in the season to be starting a garden--I put on an old punjabi, rolled up my sleeves and knelt down in the North Carolina clay.

I chopped the ground with a pick axe, pulled weeds for days, broke up cow dung, stirred manure and other good things into the soil, mixed it all up real pretty and then mapped out my plan for what to plant and where to plant each vegetable.

The squash required small hills to be formed by hand with small craters in the top, like a volcano.  So did the sweet potatoes.  That took a LOT of time.  The cucumbers required a ridge, like a long, low mountain with several little peaks indented on the tops pretty much like the other little hills.

After planting, I watered and kept the seeds moist until tiny sprouts started to break the soil.

The First Tiny Sprouts!

Oh, what a glorious victory the gardener feels when those little shoots pop out!  I could almost detect growth by the hour!  In just a few days, my little sprouts were tall enough to thin (cull).

Precious Little Plants

Now, thinning is not something I take kindly to.  It breaks my heart to throw away little sprouts just because they're smaller than the other two sprouts in the same space.  So I gently lift them out and plant them elsewhere.  Consequently, I ended up this year with, instead of only two squash plants, seven squash plants.  Instead of only three okra plants, I have a bunch.  Instead of only twenty-four bean plants, we have thirty-some.  And they're all producing lovely vegetables!  So I am not a believer in throwing away culled plants.

My husband heard through the grapevine that I had started a garden.  When he came home from India in July, he went out to see the garden.  I wanted to see his reaction, so I left the kitchen for a minute to peek at him touring the garden.  I could tell he was impressed.  He had fun peering into the thick jungle of cucumber leaves to find ripe cukes.  He twisted off a couple of squash.  He looked up at me and smiling kind of sideways, admitted, "I like your garden."  That made my day.

He kept peeking into the lush, leafy plants and found more veggies to pick.  His hands were getting too full, so I handed him a big bowl and returned to my K.P. post.  A few minutes later, he came into the kitchen to proudly deliver a big bowlful of gorgeous, succulent veggies--tomatoes, squash, cukes and beans--to offer to Sri Sri Gaura-Nitai!

Never again will my husband say to me, "I haven't seen you show much interest in gardening."

Beautiful Bounty

"Who sows a seed beneath the sod and waits--believes in God."