The Lonely Plant

This is proof that life exists. In our vegetable bed. That life can survive. In our vegetable bed. Proof that there’s enough food and water there. That life can grow there. Most important of all that we’ve more than a tinge of green thumb!

Can you see those cabbage-like leaves towards the top right? Well that is cabbage. Those greens to the top left? Yes those are some salad greens.

The title of the post should actually be the lonely cauliflower. It did have a lot of its clan for company but looks like they couldn’t survive the heavy snow. I’m totally ignoring the fact that we planted them so close that they hardly had any space to breath. Have you heard about “survival of the fit”? We know it by heart. So much so that when we were planting these we figured that all these cauliflowers would fight each other to grow the best and hence we would get a bumper crop! Ok honestly – yes they were uncomfortably close to each other but it was the snow that killed them.

We have this 8 ft X 8 ft vegetable/flower bed and we wanted to grow vegetables like we’d just bought a farmland! It was quite a learning experience. For example little did I know that the tiny cauliflower head that I buy at the supermarket takes up 6 times the space in our vegetable bed! Jokes apart, as you can see, the leaves of the cauliflower do spread almost 1ft in each direction!

On a more serious note, despite the fact that only 1 out of 12 cauliflowers survived and that too doesn’t look too healthy – we were so happy to see it! Fruit of our labor as they say.

I was reading the Farmer’s Almanac Gardening Guide and it’s foreword struck a chord with me. To quote, it said

“Digging in the dirt, planning a spring garden, weeding, and watching seeds become healthy plants both soothes and lifts our spirit. Gardening is indeed about hope. We believe seeds will sprout or we wouldn’t sow them; we plant a tree so that our grandchildren can enjoy one day.”

So true! I can tell you that every time we plant something we would watch it daily to see if it has grown or not and then admire it.

The cauliflower and the quote above have totally motivated me to start planning for the summer vegetables!! Yippee!