Tales from the Garden: a lesson in humility
Warning: there is a severe amount of blonde-ness in this post…
I am a visual learner. Always have been, always will be. As I have stated, many times before, I have grown flowers for years but this year is my first vegetable garden. Sure, I helped out in my parents garden as a child, but that was years ago and I doubt I retained much info back then on how to tend to your growing garden. But gardening is in my blood, I was born to do it, born to love it. With that being said, I had a HUGE lesson in humility on Monday..
Note: My mom and husband are going to die when they read this and realize I blogged about it, but I can’t help it..its just too good!!
It was early Monday morning. I had just come back from letting my chickens out for the day, feeding them, loving them and even having some fly up to roost on my shoulder while I checked the coop out from the night before. On my way home, I meandered thru the garden, weeding, planning and making a to do list of everything I needed to complete that day. I planted another couple of rows of sweet corn {the first didn’t really take}, I planted cosmo’s and sunflowers, tomatoes and annuals..and on my way in, I came across this..
My potatoes had started to bloom!! Now, surely it was time to hill the potatoes! In all my newbie gardening glory I ran to find dirt to hill my potatoes with, inspired by how awesome my garden was doing and thinking to myself, “wow – I really can grow vegetables”. By now the potatoes had grown a good foot tall, they are stunning, healthy and strong and I was going to hill them up, just like my books said to do. In fact, I studied those gardening books and I could swear to you, for a fact, that they read: when your potatoes are approx 4-5″ tall, hill them up so that only 1 1/2″ remain. Allow to grow another 4-5″ then hill again.” So I called up my dear husband, asking where I should get some more dirt from to hill up my potatoes and he told me that I should just be able to use a hoe and bring up enough dirt to mound them from that and wished me luck while I went on my merry way. Of course, after hanging up with Adam I grabbed a hoe and started bringing dirt up, but..it didn’t seem like it was going to do the job!!
My potatoes before the “massacre”
So…I went hunting for a shovel. Yup, I did it. I grabbed a large grain shovel and started digging my way to China, folks. You see, being the visual learner that I am, I took those readings I read from my gardening book and told myself I needed to smother my poor spuds up within an inch of their lives..
It was at this point I started thinking something wasn’t right. So I called on dear Mom to ask her advice. What I got was a mother pissing herself laughing, shaking her head at her daughter’s poor, unsupervised decision. When I realized the gravity of my miscalculation I couldn’t help but laugh, pushing my hurt pride aside. After my mother explained to me that I was just supposed to merely hill up the sides of the potato to cover the roots so as to allow room for new spuds to grow {oh my good Lord, Dawn}, I rescued my poor plant from obliteration, digging it out of the dirt grave I buried it in and saved it from a most certain death..
After the phone call to my mom
After hanging up with my mom, I finished hilling my remaining spuds the correct way & made my way in to the house to prep lunch for my husband and the minute he came in I burst out the tale of my morning lesson. All he could say was, “oh baby”..over and over again! He then chuckled in his low throaty voice and explained that most people have a problem with not hilling enough but nope, not his wife. Apparently she’s a diligent potato mounder 😉
So here’s todays lesson folks…yes I should be 100% embarrassed by my actions and probably could’ve saved face by never mentioning this story on the old blog. But this is real life, mistakes happen, sometimes to my demise and others amusements but this is my crazy life here in the country and I don’t want to forget all the little lessons I learn as I go. And just like my mom and hubby said, hey..I’m trying and I’m learning..and there just ain’t nothing wrong with that!! But please folks, if you’re growing potatoes…”hill” them, don’t “bury” them..but I’m sure you knew that already…
Anonymous - I am laughing just as hard when I read this. You learn as you go. Like you said, they never explained it in the book.
Happy Gardening
Love Mom
Dawn Cosgrove - I’m pretty sure it’s common knowledge (thus the reason it didn’t need to be in a book?!?) but I appreciate your support! Haha
dawn - This is so funny, will have to show my hubby this one. I can understand how it looked to you though. Laughing at your mom’s comment too, such a sweetie she is.
We live and learn my friend, it’s all part of life. Thanks for not being afraid to share it with us!!