How does your garden grow?
mid summer update/always angry/always in love/always THANK YOU to farm workers
The apple trees are half pruned.
The blueberries at the edge of the yard are over taken by field grass and invasive wisteria. There is a gardener snake who hides under the blue tarp who startled me the other day and is the biggest one I’ve seen in years - its body at least an inch around!
Hummingbirds delight in the bold red of Crocosmia as they do every year! Woodpecker notches up the grey spottled bark of the Rowan/Mountain Ash as they do every year and Chickadees flit in and out. The 4 year old went out all by herself with her harvest basket to pluck snap peas for the saute for dinner the other night while I wore her brother on my back; she ate all the peas in her dinner and normally she will not eat the store bought snap peas or my favorite the English peas shelled out of their pod. This is a clue for how to help humans fall in love with the earth.
There is an unruly vase of flowers that are mostly oranges and yellow - Yarrow, Feverfew, Tithonia and Nasturtiums. We made our dream come true and now the Nasturtiums are trailing over the garden bed edges.
The Raspberries have not been cleaned out since I planted these canes three years ago and they are prolific, way too crowded and delicious as ever. This fall I swear I will give them their proper!
Everywhere I look is something that needs tending too. I am lucky if I get an hour a day outside to focus in the garden. Right now though is that sweet spot in mid summer… enjoying the fruits of our simple first-year-back-to-gardening garden. Maybe all we have is some Kale, some berries, peas and some not-sweet-enough carrots. It’s more than plenty. And it’s only possible for it to be more than plenty because I can rely on the steady stream of underpaid hardworking farm workers like the crew who has been up and down and up and down are road as of late harvesting at the local raspberry farm. Because I live on a road in an agricultural valley with a blueberry farm, a chicken factory, beef cows in the fields, and a raspberry farm, and because I see farm workers in and out in and out and b/c I have grown food I think about farm workers pretty much every single day. If you eat food, how can you not think of them? And if you are not thinking of them why not? Let them be your nightly dinner time blessing.
There are still some Cherries to eat but recent rains have them molding quickly.
The baby can reach the plum tree’s lower branches and keeps tugging off the unripe fruit. I have now seen the first Muskrat of my life and it’s living in our neighbors pond!!! There are small rabbits on the edge of the driveway and last week we saw a Racoon saunter down and then run into the Blackberries. I have never seen a Racoon here in all the seven years I’ve lived here.
We walked past a sadly flattened Opossum in the road and my four year old got so mad "Freaking people!! Why did that kill that Opossum! They need to watch where they are driving.” She’s mimicking me and for that I am glad. She picked a frothy sprig of purpley-pink Spirea the other night, inhaled deeply and passionately said, "IT SMELLS LIKE THE WHOLE EARTH!!!!”
I think this is what is really the matter for so many people now. They don’t care that they killed Opossum. Or Hawk. Or Frog. Or Deer. Or Rabbit. Or Snake. I have never killed an animal with my car except once for a small Frog that hopped out right at that moment… so I don’t understand how easily people murder animals with their cars…. if you just think of beings besides Humans and now that animals love to come out at morning and dusk that if there is one Deer crossing the road there is usually at least one more if not two or three more. That Snakes are cold blooded creatures and so seek the road in summer time so they can warm up.
I am guessing most people don’t remember picking peas for dinner in a garden or how much time and labor it actually takes to grow and procure food.
They have forgotten that Spirea smells like the whole earth.
That’s what I’m thinking about this lovely summer time of mid July here in western Washington; where a new friend last weekend said that we have the prettiest summers in the whole country. And I tend to agree.
I think our main work these days ought to be how do we not calcify? How do we love our neighbors and in particular our more than human ones? For they just keep blossoming and singing and showing up and feeding us. I think we need to really remember them in this human focused world we’ve concocted and how those relationships are tantamount to our survival and thriving.
AND here are some things as of late informing my thinking as I try to push back on MAGA parroting racist bull shit about how we need to keep criminals out… while they think it’s ok that a convicted felon and rapist is in charge of the country….
A 6 year study done in Texas shows that undocumented people commit on average 50% less crime than native US born people. Surprise surprise
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD004.pdf
Farm workers are scared to come to work so if you voted for this mess or aren’t calling your reps or aren’t pushing back don’t you dare complain when food prices continue to go up
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/07/08/labor-shortage-cherry-season
Wal-mart sucks but if you’re in a rural place it’s often the only place you have to shop - here’s a reminder of how they ruined the very rural places they now have way too much power over. It saddens me that the old adage of “you don’t know what you don’t know” is true with all these republicans online who show up on pages I follow like Occupy and Democratic Socialists…. just to parrot their sad and stupid talking points about how it’s ok that an 85 year old is still working at Wal-Mart b/c "everyone works and no should be forced to fund welfare” instead of being angry that billionaires exist in the first place and … saying how great Wal-Mart is…
apparently Peter Thiel is the anti-christ
And some people are leaving MAGA and telling their stories!!!