THINGS YOU LEARN FROM GARDENING

Just when you think you're finally getting the hang of things...

I planted a mess o' beans this spring. The bush beans produced pretty well for a while, but then got infested with some little black fly that made the beans come out C-shaped, with big swollen spots

in them, so I finally had to yank them. The Italian pole beans were doing OK, but the dear deer absolutely loved them, so they stayed mostly denuded all season long. I was about to yank them as well, but they still looked so healthy down at the base, and since the baby deer were now too large to squeeze between our fence posts, and John had placed those neat new deer repellant thingies all over the garden, I decided that if I just trimmed them back a bit, they might have a fightin' chance.

Sure enough, they were back up to the top of the pole in no time, and I just picked my first perfectly beautiful bean last week. A couple of days later, I stepped out onto the balcony porch just before bedtime, to put something in the trashcan, and got startled by a sudden loud clattering of hooves. When I finally spotted the culprit, he was outside of the fence, but the guilty look on his face gave me a really bad feeling.

The next morning I went out to check for damage, and this is what I found: nekkid pole beans, gnawed on Swiss chard, and all that luscious portulaca and sweet potato vine that was finally spilling beautifully down the sides of my big red pots? Nothing but stubby twigs now.

So I guess I'm learning a lot about patience, just not so much about how to put food on the table. Ah well, at least he didn't touch my second little Sugar Baby watermelon that is now forming on the vine, and with what we learned from our last melon experiment, we might actually get more than two bites out of this one. OK, I just thought of another lesson I am learning from all of this. How to be an eternal optimist!