I spent some time working in my vegetable garden this morning. There is nothing like the calming, productive feeling you get from tending the land with your own hands, especially on a weather-perfect day! I picked some lettuce, planted some edamame, and weeded.
The hardest part was weeding out some of the too-many “volunteer” tomato plants—I hate to pull out healthy, growing plants. I got friends to take some plants, but I still have literally dozens of extras, which by now are pretty big. (Want some?) Today I tried to be ruthless and just pull them. But I couldn’t get myself to weed the ones that already have flowers, even though I know the consequence will be too much crowding in the garden.
What’s the lesson here? Pull them out when they’re still tiny seedlings, so I don’t feel so bad? Or more “networking”—could I have found a home for every one of them, if I’d tried harder? Or, don’t worry about it so much? In gardening, like other human endeavors, it’s never one hundred percent unambiguous or easy to know what to do, and sometimes your decisions don’t feel quite right.
I never liked "thinning" either, but I never thought about giving the plants away -- I just composted them. But I like that idea much better!
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