Gardening: Holiday offers a time for reflection

Like many of you I will enjoy today with family, good food and celebrating all the bounty with which I have been blessed. I am also celebrating the end of the garden season. As crazy as it was, it was a good season in my garden. Most of the leaves are raked up, beds are mulched and the garlic is planted. I am waiting for one more plant order to arrive hopefully before the ground freezes. In preparation however, I dug a hole in my nursery bed and stored a bucket of dirt in the garage just in case.

At the end of a gardening day, I usually settle into my thinking chair under the Amur maple tree by our lower patio. I bought the tree in a 5-gallon pot at a nursery closeout sale 40 years ago and planted it just after we finished building our house. It has grown with the garden over the years and now provides lovely shade on a hot summer afternoon. I’ve spent many hours in its shade reflecting on what I got done that day and how lucky I am to have the gardens I built and to just listen.

I listen for the chickadees and nuthatches flitting through its branches cracking sunflower seeds above my head. At times, the bits of sunflower hulls rain down on me. It’s the same when the squirrels are cleaning out the maple seeds. I listen to the wind as it whispers through our 100-plus-year-old pines. I wonder where it is coming from that day and what weather changes it is heralding.

At times, the grass rustles in the field below the house as one of “our” deer slips in for a snack or gets up from a nap in the tall grass. It’s a love-hate relationship when they find goodies I thought were deer resistant. This fall, they paid special attention to our plum and apple tree cleaning up any fallen fruit and even butting the trunk to knock more down. We got half a dozen apples in the melee. They are forgiven though because one of them usually has her fawn in the field every year.

I have grown to love gardening in our Spokane environment. There is something about the intensity of each season and how they envelop us in our garden chores, even the mundane ones. We live hard and fast through each season chasing weed crops, planting cycles and weather patterns. At times we have sharp words to say to Mother Nature but usually because we aren’t following her lead and are trying to impose our will on her program. We will never succeed in beating her.

And so, take some time this holiday weekend to reflect on your gardening year. As crazy as it was, it was still a good year to marvel at the adventure we had, the beauty we saw and the bounty we grew even when the tomatoes didn’t get ripe until the end of September.