Exuberant is such a great word. You can actually hear the burst of energy as you say it. Exuberant is what the garden is right now. In fact, EXUBERANT!!! is what the garden is right now.
We have had more rain this winter than we can remember, and it has fallen many days a week, week after week. Then, in late March, the weather turned warmer. Oh my, every lettuce, every kale, every root crop, every broccoli laughed with glee and grew a foot, or two, or three. Today, two of us waded in with weed eaters and began clearing at least enough area that the sides of raised beds could actually be seen. Two feet down from the tops of wild grasses signs were uncovered that said, “Path.” Only another foot down to actually recreate the paths.
This is a huge garden season. With everything already in the ground exploding with growth, there is just the keeping up – just the uncovering: “Oh right, there’s a bed there in that thicket!” There is end-of-season harvesting of greens and turnips and rutabagas. We will give the beds that produced those winter crops lots of nourishment and let them rest until next fall. The spring-summer beds need preparing and every seed packet says, “plant in April.” And we are fencing and reviving a garden area down the hill, hoping to plant it this spring.
Whew! This is a perfect opportunity for overwhelm. Conditioning’s welcome mat is out for urgency, exasperation, panic – all the responses that would pit our energies against the garden’s, that would cast it and us not as colleagues, as partners, but as contenders. So good to see.
Meanwhile, the garden puts out its own happy welcome mat: to spring, to growth, to endless abundance. “Come meet my exuberance with your own,” it says. And so we shall.
Gasshō
Penny