On a recent sticky August morning, I waded through the mint to look for zucchini and corn. Despite the memes about abundance appearing on my Facebook feed, I found exactly one zucchini fruit. Season total: three. The corn patch that had looked so promising outwardly, upon shucking revealed ears that were unpollinated, bug-eaten, or contained only smut. But the mint! The mojito mint my Garden Together class planted in 2020 now sprawled and climbed and flowered and crept and produced mint leaves for eating and mint oils for smelling and mint plants for digging up and spreading to other gardens. When I go with what grows, usually with the least amount of effort from me, my garden is prolific.
Sunflowers are similar. I really did intend to plant a forest, but it took two years. Most of this year’s plants came from the seeds of a dozen or so 2021 stalks. On the same monsoony morning as I had marveled at mint, I bushwacked a path into the stand of 50+ sunflowers to see what else had survived. “Magic” is a good answer. Winter remnants of peas, lettuce, carrots, and broccoli were special discoveries down in the shadows. So were determined rollie pollies and spiral spider webs. But most of all, I was struck by a sense of time travel back to age twelve-ish, in past secret gardens. The huge oleander hedge in which my cousins and I trimmed a cave. The ever-shaded nook under my grandparents’ African sumac tree, complete with rollie pollie playmates. In the present, I allowed myself to just sit, watch, feel, breath, down under the sunflowers. And with a smile I remembered Water Play preschoolers just last month who confidently and inquisitively traveled under flower-laden limbs to experience a world of their own. Going with what grows has abundant rewards.
Stories of abundance change with time and space. This summer, in these Marana Community Garden plots, other wildly successful plants include: firewheels from a wildflower seed mix;
agastache and chocolate mint originally planted from pots; devil’s claw volunteers from last year’s left-behind pods; and a permitted takeover of Ha:l squash from the plot next door. Last year the tomatoes took over, and despite my spring culling of sprouts they are making a late summer comeback. The basil that also returned, I moved to pots to pass along in a future container gardening class.
Meanwhile, a few bean plants are alive, a few pepper plants produced, and green onions march on even while getting engulfed by chocolate mint. If I was counting on this garden to supply a hearty meal, I would have to change my ways – tend my rows more methodically, protect more against pests, add a bit more nutrients to the soil, take more time to drive and to tinker with irrigation. But my gardens – this overgrown patch of herbs and sunflowers, my native-plant-haven at home, my diverse-as-my-students collection at school – provide abundant wonder. If you have some space and some acceptance of the unexpected, try to go with what grows.
