On Sunday afternoon, I returned to the scene of my planting back in December. Although I’d seen pictures that demonstrated actual seedling growth, I did have some trepidation, imagining the bed that I planted to be barren (again, I had seen pictures of radish seedlings, but they were up close and, well, PhotoShop is a powerful program), while the bed Cameron planted to be lush and filled with vegetables.
Luckily, I was wrong. Of course, I was standing on Anita and Cam’s upstairs deck, pointing out seedlings like a cartographer, and from there, it appeared there was a Very Large Hole in the center of the bed I worked on.
“Down there are the radishes,” I told a friend who was patiently taking the aerial tour. “And those seedlings in the ditch are leeks.” I gulped. “And I don’t remember what it is in the middle, but they’re apparently not doing as well as the other things I planted.”
Anita, who was up there with us, leaned over. “No, everything came up,” she said. “You just can’t see it from here. Those are the beets.”
And indeed, as it turned out, upon a closer, ground-level inspection, everything had come up. The beet seedlings are near-microscopic, indeed, but you can tell that they’re what they purported to be on the package.
“See?” I said to anyone who would listen. “Beets!”
But since we were all there for a pig roast, people were much less interested in vegetables that afternoon than in meat. Still, after a summer away from gardening, it spurred me on toward locking in that community garden plot. Because as exciting as the pig was, it was at least as exciting, if not more, to see those seedlings popping up where I’d buried rows of small seeds.
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