Putting the garden to bed

Somehow it's October. With the rains imminent, I'm trying to force myself to do the things that need to be done in the garden: removing the dead and dying foliage of both intentional and opportunistic plants, clearing out the vegetable beds, planting cover crops. It's a set of tasks I usually enjoy, and that almost always find me wistful. Especially as a vegetable gardener, this is when it's clear what did and didn't happen according to plan, and when I make resolutions for next year.

Sandy in the front yard in 1998, I think

I am more wistful than usual this year. My mental to-do list is frozen on June 15, when we weren't quite to summer yet and we still thought we'd have a fairly ambitious gardening year. Sandy never gardened again, and I've spent maybe six hours in the garden since then.

Our last real day of gardening together was June 5. Some things remain exactly as we left them that day, expecting to return to finish various tasks or start new ones.

The tomatoes I've been harvesting were started from seed back in March, planted out before our vacation in May, and I didn't get them staked until just after Sandy died. Because of the cold summer Seattle had, we didn't have any ripe tomatoes until the end of August, more than a month after Sandy was gone. When I planted those seeds, debating the varieties, and when we rebuilt the tomato bed, and when she helped me put them in the ground with their wall o' waters, neither of us had any idea that she wouldn't get to enjoy their fruit.

A few weeks after she died, I harvested the potatoes she planted in April. The cosmos she planted have been in bloom since August, as well; she never got to see them.

I never planted beans and squash, worked in cover crops, or weeded much of anything. About all I've had the energy to do is to harvest. Luckily, onions thrive on neglect, and the tomatoes are on auto-pilot.

Twenty years ago, one of the people I shared a house with had just lost his life partner to cancer. The room I rented was in what had been her house. I moved in in August, and I was surprised to notice tomatoes in the back yard in September. James told me that Meg, the woman who'd died, had planted them. I thought then that it was an amazing thing that a dying woman would plant tomatoes for someone else to enjoy. (It's Seattle; most people don't set their tomatoes out until late May, at least.) Now I know that she may have been expecting to harvest them herself. Just as Sandy expected to eat the potatoes and tomatoes, and to see the cosmos bloom. Cancer isn't predictable; everything can change so quickly.

It's an understatement to say that I dislike surprises. I always want to know what's coming next, and I want to have a plan. I can pivot when circumstances require, but curveballs are not welcome. And now, shaken and betrayed by the universe, I find I no longer trust plans. I'm not making my usual resolutions in the garden. I can't quite see how it will look next year, don't know what I'll plant, don't know what the universe will see fit to throw my way. All my assumptions are gone. I'm putting cover crops everywhere and I'll deal with it later. Just like everything else.