“Knee high by the Fourth of July!” An old axiom that I heard every year we were on the farm and the saying still exists among those who choose to raise a garden.
This year, it was tougher to live up to the adage.
Gardeners like me tend to be optimistic. Blame it on my early farm background when I witnessed my dad and those farmers around us who put seed in the ground with no guarantee whatsoever that one ear of corn or one stalk of wheat would survive to harvest.
Just because money was spent on seed, fertilizer, machinery and fuel, not to say anything about the labor it took to put it in the ground, there was no way of knowing whether a farmer would be able to pay the bills at the end of the year.
But for the 22 years that I lived on that farm, that was just the way it was.
John Wetrosky (2022)
The garden I and my wife tend now is in many ways no different, but on a much smaller scale!
I like to get our garden in the ground early. It is an affliction that I’ve always had, and I paid dearly for that tendency this year.
After a long winter, who could blame me? A somewhat early spring gave promise that the soil would warm, the rains would come and my potatoes would sprout and my corn would puncture the surface and reach for the sun.
That didn’t happen this year, as many of my gardening friends know.
The early season warmth gave way to cold spells that put ice in our birdbath in early June. My cut potato seedlings made an effort to come to the surface, but after two weeks of near freezing temperatures, the spuds returned below ground, some of them never to surface again.
My sweetcorn did likewise; and to top it off, the rains stopped coming, which sent me to watering the retreating seeds with cold well water, which no doubt also put a dent in their future production.
The back and forth cold and warm spells had our patch of soil wondering whether it would survive. Some seedlings did not. My potato patch rows looked like a shotgun had laid waste to them.
But we soldiered on with some replanting and nursing. Finally, warmer temps and long-needed rain urged our crops to actually look as though they might make it to the canning room.
We’ve already dined on my wife’s fresh rhubarb pie, and we’ve pulled radishes from the earth. Those radish sandwiches are one of my favorite summer treats! Ever had one? Try one sometime. All you need is sliced and salted radishes, a slab of real butter on a slice of folded over wheat bread and you’ll thank me in the morning. That I can guarantee!
As this column is written, the tomatoes are blooming as well as the peas; the green beans are showing promise; my wife’s kale is looking hearty even though I rarely touch the stuff. Pumpkin and squash vines are beginning their journeys across the garden plot, and the sweet corn is growing taller every day, shooting skyward and will be tasseling in just a week or two.
And by the way, that sweet corn was actually “knee high by the Fourth of July”! Well, at least half of the crop reached that height. The other half is still making up its mind in case another cold front hits.
But there are no guarantees in farming or gardening. I learned that long ago. In some strange way, that is comforting to me.
See you next time. Okay?
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