Not neat and tidy gardening

Despite my membership in the garden club, my gardening veers more toward the surprise style than the orderly beds of lines and patterns. Surprise means that I plant the seeds, vaguely remembering what I planted last year in that spot, and then fail to label or record the seed types afterward, meaning that whatever comes up is a surprise.

Some years, I think I just end up with an edible mess. Last year, my fencing didn't go up until after my snap peas had been beheaded by deer. I planted potatoes as an afterthought, and chard, and tomatoes, all of which did well, but I was determined to do better. This year, I have thriving potatoes and dill, onions and a few lettuce (plants gone to seed last year), thriving snap peas within their fence, rhubarb, and sunflowers - all before tomato planting, which I will dare to do next weekend, a few days before our frost-free date (I'm betting on global warming giving me a few extra days).

In most of my beds, too, there is also something else coming up - weeds? Oddly enough, I don't know what the seedling is, but in addition to the identifiable friends, there is another I don't know, but hopefully will soon. It might be pokeweed, given that the compost I use has some large pokeweed specimens growing nearby, and which I have never watched growing from seed. Whatever it is, as soon as I identify it, I will have a lot of weeding to do.

Waiting, weeding, and hoping: these are my tasks in the May garden. Waiting, to see what the heck I planted. Weeding, as soon as I distinguish friend from foe. Hoping, that the garden will offer something newly appealing to my picky girls, that they will finally try my purple potatoes, that they will understand the appeal of onions, or that I can coax them into eating strawberry-rhubarb pie before they dissect the rhubarb out of it. Hoping, that the disorder will become something magical, the predictable miracle of food growing from soil.