The Wishful Weeds

Last year I had a perfect garden. What else could I have after wishing it and readingFindhorn, building a greenhouse, buying a composter, double-digging, mulching, using everything organic, blessing the seeds through chanting, planting by the moon, guarding with bug predators, scarecrows, fake snakes and owls, watering, weeding, and always talking to the sprouts words of love and God? But that was last year.

This year began by everything hitting the fan, the most poignant being an unseasonably wet Spring so I couldn't even get to the garden. Then the greenhouse burned down with all my green-thumbed paraphernalia, the tiller died, and my seeds rotted in the basement flood. As if this wasn't bad enough, all experts agreed that in spite of the freak rains in early summer this would be the year of Dust Bowl Two.

Undaunted because of last year's phenomenal 4-H winnings, I hired a crew that drilled not one but two wells, one artesian, so I could defy the grapes of wrath in style. But during the drilling, the operator was caught by the trouser cuff which sent him to the hospital with a mangled ankle. The drill motor burned out. Then the drilling manager had a heart attack. Was Nature writing something big and tall on the wall, but I was blinded by last year's success so I couldn't read it? I think if I had noticed it I wouldn't have paid any attention anyway. Don't grow a garden this

summer, indeed. Why, I wasbornto raise plants!

Had I listened to my inner voice and read the signs, the only thing I should have planted would have been rice. Instead, I cleverly drained the field with a combination of well-placed trenches, two pumps, and an enormous fan used in wind tunnels that I scrounged from a nearby Air Force testing hangar. Ha! I said triumphantly, I whupped that obstacle, and confidently worked the soil with my expensive new tiller. My work so boosted me that I knew I would duplicate last year, whatever Nature might dish out.

But as every farmer/gardener knows, Nature is an expert in pacing her obstacles. A rain here or there does little damage. But a shower just before your day off or every Friday for a month, they keep you away from the garden no matter how many gadgets you haul in. It was now mid-May and I had a second-batch of seed in the ground. Surely Nature, the Elementals, or the Muse of plants wouldn't let a summer go by without allowing athingto grow. So I waited patiently. I waited through the first week of June, the second, the third, all the way to the night before July 4th.

By now, of course, my record-making plot of the previous year had a full month since its last tilling. It had been blessed by ample rain and periodic warm, sunny days. Perfect for growth, and growth it exhibited in abundance. The abundance, however, was all weeds. But being a strong, bull-headed, patient and determined Taurus, I knew I would win if I just stuck to it. God simply wouldn't let me down. Well, my patience lasted until the day of America's independence. That's when I said it's time to stop being led by the nose and take the bull by the horns. So when everyone else was blowing firecrackers, I planted my garden. Again.

Now that I look back on the experience, I see that I strained my new tiller by forcing it to chomp and grind in the weed jungle. Repeatedly I had

to turn the groaning machine over and de-weed it, even though I tilled only the rows where I planted, not between each row. Those I left knee-high in weeds. "Who cares," I asked the garden, "I'll till them under once the seeds sprout. Ha, Nature," I spat , "I really am going to get agarden!"

So I thought until the day after I sowed, when the rains started again. And supersaturated the earth as if it was Noah revisited. The result --- no seeds germinated. I stared at the alternating rows of seed-trough mud and rain-forest weeds with an open mouth. And the truth is, I gave up. But even though I surrendered, I was conscious enough to remember the prognosis: THIS is the year of the drought. I also remember muttering that if I get a thing from this swamp it'll be an out-and-out miracle.

The rains held for two weeks. But it didn't matter if they lasted two years since I'd truly given up. For all I cared it could snow. I gave up to the point that I ignored the garden for two more weeks after the rains stopped. Then, one day out of habit I sat in the crotch of an apple tree and stared out. Much to my surprise, almost everything I'd planted had sprouted. What glee I experienced! I sloshed through my rice-less paddies and took stock. Yes, zucchini had made it. And look at the pumpkins and squash and cucumbers and sunflowers. It truly was a miracle. With spirits renewed, I went at the weeds with a vengeance. Only to find that the tiller blew a gasket, the valves died, and the faithful new machine slopped ankle-deep in mud. And THEN the afore-predicted drought hit.

It started with insufferable heat. In the mid-90's and low 100's every day, the heat plus the steaming humidity drove even garden fanatics into air conditioned buildings. Helplessly I watched as the mid-row weeds, fully established now they'd had over a month to grow, were being challenged by their brothers that grew near my fragile seedlings. When the ground finally cracked leaving Grand Canyons everywhere, I knew that

no miracle, however high its origin, could overcome this. I had to face the fact that from flood to drought is beyond man's control and ingenuity. I watched the garden for a few days, then slipped back into my flood-day depression. Meanwhile, the weeds kept growing.

What happened next was a paradox. While Nature had given me the most fecund garden the previous year, full of baseball-bat zucchini, the most golden sweet corn munchable, the juiciest, most flavorful tomatoes imaginable, now it had produced an equal abundance and variety of weeds. In fact, there were so many and so healthy that I invited the Department of Agriculture and University Botany Department to help me identify them.

The professionals were astonished by the number, the variety, and how so many weeds that NEVER grew next to each other were now smiling at each other. Desert weeds flourished aside wetland growth, mountain varieties thrived amidst lowland species, and all burst forth in the grandest display of Nature's mastery over man. Yes, here were prickly pear cactus, the poisonous Klamath weed, ragwort, cheep sorrel, swamp horsetail, conquefoil, low star grass, hawkweed, corn spurrey, knapweed, daisy, horsetail, field sorrel, doorstep weed, salt grass, tussock weed, pickleweed, saltbushes, nitrophila, yerba mansa, common skikeweed, goldenrod, kockia, saltwort, samphia, sesuvium, many-flowered aster, wild lettuce, wild onions, horseradish, partridge pea, broom bush, yellow roadflax, penny cress, field peppergrass, wormseed, Canada blue grass, field madder, mountain bluet, yellow camomile, smartweed, hedge bindweed, silverweed, meadow pink, hedge nettle, stinking willie, March foxtail, tradescantia, rice cutgrass, Joe-Pye weed, innumerable sedges, field mustard, horse nettle, morning glory, creeping Charlie, quckgrass, and pine-apple weed.

Also several varieties of burrdock and thistle, including the national flower of Scotland and the eye-tantalizing Canadian Thistle. The experts agreed that I had a veritable cornucopia of the great weeds of the world including many, if I chose, I could eat such as pigweed, carrion flower, cattail, curly dock, dandelion, several species of fern, ground cherry or husk tomato, groundnut, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, lady's thumb, lamb's quarters, marsh marigold, pikeweed, milkweed, purslane or pusley, skunk cabbage, Solomon's Seal, sow thistle and Russian thistle, Spatterdock, toothwort, Turk's cap lily, watercress, wild leek, wild primose, wood lily. I tell you, the experts had a field day identifying, categorizing, taking samples and photographs to authenticate the phenomenon.

It is well known that God works in mysterious ways. Now I know that His right arm, Nature, follows His example. For this summer I didn't get what I expected: domesticated veggies. Instead, I got the most prolific, exotic, verdant collection of weeds known to man. And all in abundance.

The obvious lesson gained this summer, not withstanding that God and Nature are the True Gardeners and They call the shots, I learned by pure accident while half-asleep. The dawn after the Ag man and professor left, I heard the clearest voice tell me, "Hey, Green Thumb, you got what you wanted: 'May everything in my garden grow like weeds.'"

That's right, I learned the hard way that we reallydohave to be careful what we wish.