Shared Bounty

I thought I'd come back and give you guys proof of our gardening labor this year. Some aspects of our garden turned out heartier than others. For example, our lavender plant is going stronger than any of us ever expected. Especially Littles, who was convinced that I'd already killed it before we even transplanted it over to the raised beds. Pessimist.

Lavender in a glass in the background.

I did kill the zucchini and squash (root rot, although they produced a lot of blooms and a couple small vegetables that disintegrated on the vine before they finally died for good) and the bell pepper plants (our trip in May did them in). But the tomato plants are hanging in there--and even produced one beautiful tomato. Maybe we'll get more, but I'm grateful for the one we did get. And I ate the whole thing myself because the kids are philistines, and my neighbor was too sick for tomatoes the day it reached perfect ripeness.

Proof of life.
Before I ate that sucker.

Our jalapeño plant has been absolutely prolific--producing way more jalapeños than I could ever eat and of varying levels of spice, so you never quite know how exciting your meal is about to get until you bite into it. The strawberry plants gave us more than a few tiny and brightly sweet strawberries, though only ever one or two at a time, and are still alive and will hopefully make more adorable strawberries for us before we move next summer if I can manage to keep them alive through the winter. This is a big if.

Those jalapeños like to get artsy on me.

I suppose it's been mostly a mixed bag of results, but the fact that my kids can now say they've harvested jalapeños and a tomato (singular), lavender and strawberries, is kind of huge to me. And while we lived in a trailer park, no less. Also, they've seen that sometimes we give things our best shot but that still doesn't always guarantee the results we want. Still, we keep trying and tweaking and teaching ourselves new things. And that's not necessarily a bad lesson to learn.

It's not always the most well-weeded garden, and some days the plants look better than other days (my mint and basil seem to wax and wane with the moon), but I'm glad that we pushed ourselves to take a risk and try something new. Even if the fruit of our labor has been primarily jalapeños, we've also harvested some curiosity, a little bit of hard work, a smidge of beauty, and the belief that dirt under your fingernails is not something to shy away from.

So many jalapeños,
so little time.

We've also seen that everything looks better in certain lights, and sunrise is a forgiving time. But only for plants because they don't need coffee.

The mint plant only agrees to be photographed at sunrise.

But our biggest discovery is that gardens, like most things, are more fun when they can be shared. Twinkle enjoyed taking solitary strawberries to our neighbor and small bouquets of lavender next door. There are daily deposits of jalapeños across the field to the neighbor who went in with us on garden stuff. And maybe one day we'll get more than one tomato so that we can share those too. In the meantime, we know now that sharing a garden, and the work that comes with it, and the beauty and bounty that came from it (even if it was mostly jalapeños) has just been good.

Lavender makes everyone happy.
Except for the strawberries that wish it would
get out of their space.