“Do not let the beauty of this thing, and the cheapness of that, tempt you to buy unnecessary articles. Doctor Franklin's maxim was a wise one, 'Nothing is cheap that we do not want.' Buy merely enough to get along with at first. It is only by experience that you can tell what will be the wants of your family. If you spend all your money, you will find you have purchased many things you do not want, and have no means left to get many things which you do want. If you have enough, and more than enough, to get everything suitable to your situation, do not think you must spend it all, merely because you happen to have it. Begin humbly.”
– Lydia M. Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1832)
It’s
the trap all of us fall into come the cold months of winter. The seed catalogs that have been arriving in
the mail since the last leaves of autumn tumbled to the ground are one-day laid
out across the couch, the to-scale garden plan up on the computer screen
(because I’m one of those people), and the cost estimates verse harvest
estimates spreadsheets (because I’m also one of them too) of the last
three years sit causally in the corner.
All the pain, aggravation, and backbreaking labor of years’ past are
hidden in the cobwebbed corners of our mind as snow flies outside the window,
and we plan to “start anew next season” and lie to ourselves, promising “we’ll
keep up with it better next year.” Yup,
it’s that time of year again – time to plan the garden.
When
the piles of seed catalogs arrive, my husband and I are like kids in a candy
store, circling and highlighting seemingly everything and anything we’d love to
try next year in the garden. “Oh, those
are the coolest pumpkins ever!” (Ignore, the fact that we said the same thing
last year and the squash bugs will devour every living thing in the squash
patch each and every year, carrying diseases that’ll spread to other plants
throughout the garden on their heels.)
“Look, at the tomatoes. These
will be great to can!” (Forget about
the over 400lbs of tomatoes we put up for winter use for the two of us two years ago, and the just as many tomatoes this
past year, which are now making our canning shelves sag under the weight.) “Oh, broom straw, that’d be fun! We can always make the garden bigger.” (Wait… seriously?! You do
realize we have 4,500+ square feet of garden space already, and clearly not
enough “free labor” or time to contend with it all.)
Fortunately
each year practicality sets in sometime around February, and we rethink and
recalculate our garden selections and expenses before ordering. Well, kind of. Come on, you have to try growing peanuts at least once, and then try again the
following year because giving up when they didn’t grow quite as well as we
desired just isn’t part of the plan.
And, we did decrease the amount of tomato plants from 40 to a mere 27
the following year because we understood that we didn’t need 400+ pounds of
tomatoes for two years running.
(Seriously, I know what you veteran gardeners are thinking. I get it.
Stop laughing.) Don’t worry; the
hidden costs of gardening will soon creep into view once the ground is able to
be broken: gas for the borrowed rot-o-tiller, lack of enough tomato stakes for
the plants, hoses that have mysteriously sprung leaks, and so many other things
that it’ll make your head spin. Yet the
true realization of the workload will never set in until mid-summer when you’re
playing pepper pick-up across the lawn, and wishing that your husband would
just run all the tomatoes over with the lawnmower to make salsa the easy way. (Wouldn't that be awesome?)
The most important thing I did to curb our
enthusiasm was the first year we had moved into our current home was take a
picture from the same position all twelve months of the year. Aside from the white cherry blossoms turning into a
sea of green then falling into crisp autumn colors before being piled high with
snow, there was a lesson to be learned that I hadn’t thought about with each
photograph taken. Front and center in
the photograph, every photograph, was
the garden; every pleasing green sprout of new life in the spring, every
blasted weed and bug in mid-summer, and the unfortunate view of what we
couldn’t keep up with throughout the growing season come autumn. It was an unplanned reality check we took too
lightly the second year, and will possibly take too lightly this year as
well.
Half of a Not-So Weed Free
Garden – 2014
Everyone
should understand when they open those seed catalogs in the dead of winter when
anything green seems inviting that a garden, any garden, is a lot of work. The weeds will spring up just when you should
be canning berries, and continue through every headache-worthy harvest you get,
until they start to choke out the crops as you scramble to control them just as
your 200th pound of tomatoes is removed from the vine. The bugs will fly this way and that, eating
every living thing but the weeds, when it’s so hot outside that working in
daylight is unheard of as you scramble to exterminate them. The ground will be so dry for weeks that
it’ll begin to crack and then the rains will fall down in buckets, drowning out
the newly planted seedlings as you scramble to save them. The winds will whip up across the fields
toppling the tomato cages, heavy with fruit, and in the gusting winds and
driving rains you will scramble to right them.
You will be so exhausted from harvesting, preserving the crops, and
saving seeds for the following season, that you will be scrambling to find even
a moment’s rest.
Yet
as we sit here, bundled under blankets with the seed catalogs spread out across
our laps, dreaming about the most amazing crops we’ve ever seen and how easy it
will be to maintain the garden this year,
the true moral of the story escapes us… for now. “Do not
let the beauty of this thing, and the cheapness of that, tempt you to buy
unnecessary articles.” The same unnecessary articles that will increase a
workload far beyond what you could have imagined in your wildest dreams come
the warm days of spring and summer. But,
oh, how wonderful those ornamental gourds would look come autumn…
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