Today I picked my first okra crop. I spent well over an hour and a half in the garden and wound up late for work. It was 75 degrees and cloudy, a beautiful day to work outside. I suppose the serenity of it all caused me to lose track of time. That, and the fact that I had twice as much work to do.
I think gardening is sort of like a video game in that it gets more and more complex with each new step. When you master level 1 of fighting off big weeds and protecting baby plants, then you move to level two, which is fighting off billions of tiny weeds, watering constantly and still protecting the plants. Level 3 combines all of this plus evil grasshopper ninjas. (The secret to that level was finding out about a magical dust that kills off the villain.) Today I entered level four. Not only was there big weeds, little weeds and grasshoppers to be fought, but now there was a beautiful menagerie of dead grasshoppers and baby frogs to avoid, plus you have to harvest the crop. One may think harvesting okra is quite simple. Well, it is and it isn't. The picking is easy because you simply break, twist or cut the stem off from the plant and through the fruit in a bucket. The hard part is knowing when to pick it. Just like those darn video games, timing is everything. Pick to early and the fruit isn't ripe, but pick a day or two later and the darn thing is 6 inches long and tough as a rock.
I'm not the hardest working Gardener there is, I'm trying, but my time commitment to the garden has been about one morning a week, sometimes two. One week ago I tended my garden and was very pleased. There were lots of baby sprouts of okra, and several small squash plants growing. It had finally rained a few inches, for the first time all summer! That rain brought lots of growth, a skip-watering-free card, and the addition of baby weeds solidly covering the earth. What blows my mind, is less than a week later, the baby okra sprouts are already overgrown and too tough to eat! Where did the time go? They grow up so fast...
Luckily it is raining again this week, 1 inch yesterday and it is currently falling outside my window. We've been in a drought so long I guess I don't actually understand the role of rain. For the first 2 months of my gardening career I relied solely on water out of a hose for nourishment, but the last two weeks have seemed like a vacation because nature has basically taken care of itself. I guess that's sort of how the whole thing works, isn't it? You plant the seeds and help them out along the way, but the end result is up to nature--it's up to God. Perhaps this is how child rearing takes place too.I have been pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of gardening. I am the type who doesn't do anything without reading a book about it first, and when I took on this whole project I had envisioned grandpa being my book, holding my hand through each step of the process until I knew with somewhat certainty what I was doing. It hasn't been like that at all though, really, with the exception of the first planting and weeding, I've pretty much done everything on my own. The level of my family's farm and garden expertise is so high that explaining the basics isn't something they can comprehend. I could tell by the way my elementary questions were handled by my grandpa and dad. It's like their minds literally could not register the fact that I didn't already know this stuff.
While I love the farm and the earth and all that jazz, I've never really been an A+ farmer's daughter. I was in 4-H and FFA, but that was all rather socially obligated since I didn't show animals. I thought about showing a pig once, but dad said I 'd be the one getting up at 6 every morning to feed, water and walk it, so I decided not to.
A large majority of my childhood was spent playing on the farm. But I didn't drive tractors, collect eggs and milk cows like one might assume. My cousins and I ran around the open spaces creating forts and houses, games and adventures. When we were forced to retract inside for dinner (lunch), we would clean ourselves up and eat with the family, afterwards finding new escapades involving grandma's lipstick and old dresses. My Dad was always on the tractor working hard and the men in the family would assure my girl cousins and I that we needed to help grandma in the kitchen, rather than our dad's on the farm. So we did, and I'll tell you what, I do know how to make a mean chicken fried steak, but ask me about acres and cattle and I might give you a blank stare.
It's not that I disagree with my spot on the family farm so much as it is that I just don't learn things in a normal way. I have to see things written out on paper or acted out in front of me. If we're going to talk numbers of acres and numbers of cattle blah, blah, blah...you better hold your tongue till I have a pad of paper and a pen to take notes on. Then I need a good hour or so to commit this information to memory. That's just the way I learn. Unfortunately, farm life seems to be less educational and more intuitive. I guess that's what I mean when I say the simplicity of gardening surprised me. With little to no instruction, each day I show up at the farm with a tank top and some muddy tennis shoes. I then rummage around till I find a pair of gloves and grandpa's assorted hoes. After that I pretty well dive into my work. Each visit presents something different, and each visit I learn something new. If something odd happens I ask dad or grandpa and they of course, always have the answer.Actually, I did stump them one time. Last week after gardening, I cleaned up and got ready for work as usual. Later that morning I was sitting at my desk when I caught a glimpse of my shin. I screeched and rolled my chair back from behind the dark interior of my desk. I blinked hard and my stomach rolled up in a knot as I realized I had large red blotches all over my legs, from knee cap to ankle and from shin bone to the fat of my calf. Medical things really creep me out, and especially ugly, unexplainable creepy medical things on my own flesh. Eww. I looked and I looked and I couldn't turn away even though my stomach was getting incredibly weak. How awful, how embarrassing, but what was it? I went home at lunch, eager to show my mom my disgusting news, but she was at sewing class. So I slapped on some Aloe Vera gel and went back to the office.
It wasn't until late that night I had the opportunity to show my folks what the garden did to my legs. Horrified, they both asked if it was chiggers. I had assumed that myself, but because they didn't itch I wasn't sure what to make of them. Mom suggested I take a benadryl and Dad said the same. So for a full week, I had to wear pants to work in the Oklahoma July heat of 107 degrees. It wasn't easy, but I couldn't expose those disease-looking legs. Fortunately, the bumps eventually went away, and before returning to the garden today I lathered myself in Avon's Skin-So-Soft (an old tradition of our family) and so far, have seen no return of the bumps. What they were exactly, still remains a mystery.
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