I would like to open this journal with a photo of my obscenely abundant beet harvest. I planted these at the end of June and noticed that the seedlings never grew past the first two leaves (cotyledons).
With heat waves baking my concrete patio in the 80s and occasional 90s, and little shade, it just wasn’t their season. Beets are a cool-season crop and according to the San Diego Seed Company’s growing chart, I’m not supposed to sow beets until at least September.
But I was impatient.
This was my first foray into gardening after multiple ill-fated attempts to keep plants alive throughout my life.
For example, I grew a cilantro plant on my apartment balcony ten years ago.
Then I saw the faintest wisps of spider webbing on the railings.
I should have known. This cilantro plant would become a rampant nest for spiders. Look at all its little leaves and stems! Dream real estate for a nice, God-fearing family of eight-legged killers. Look at that nice shadowy space under the rim of the pot! Perfect space for a little “friend” to hide and bite your fingertips as you’re lifting the pot.
Filled with dread, I reluctantly abandoned my cilantro plant and never again set foot on the balcony for the last six years of my lease. Spiders wove and jumped freely on the balcony and the cilantro plant died, reseeded itself, and came back multiple times throughout the years, turning itself into a massive, intimidating tangle of dead, woody stems and new growth.
I would stand at the closed balcony door looking longingly at this monster of a cilantro.
But I was terrified of all the spiders that could be out there. The big ones. The small ones. The invisible ones. The ones that crawl inside your shirt with all their eight legs and maybe more—
I love the idea of growing one’s own food. The maternal side of my family were farmers, and both my grandma and my mom were excellent gardeners, with plants that flourished and grew and fruited. On the other hand, I tended to kill plants, even succulents, which are supposed to be easy to keep alive. One could say that I loved them to death (with lots of water), and there is probably a wider metaphor into my life that we can use here, but I will just say that it’s something I’m working on.
In my hasty enthusiasm, I decided to sow seeds outside of their recommended seasons to see what would happen.
These four beet seedlings burst from the ground and must have realized, This patio is hotter than the devil’s asshole. Fuck this shit. Then they went into a plant coma and gave up on life, but were too lazy to die, so they cotyLEDmeON with the hope that maybe they’d bounce back at some point.
It is mid-August and they should be much bigger now, but the mini little ittybitty leaves have stayed the same.
Well, I thought, they’re not dead…but they don’t seem to be growing any bigger.
I pulled them out. Turns out, their roots never grew past the seedling stage. They were stunted and would have stay that way if they remained in the garden bed, perhaps forever, until we are swallowed by the expanding and dying sun millions of years in the future.
I guess the deeper lesson, if there is one, is that sometimes it’s okay to scrap an unsuccessful or struggling project and start anew. There are a lot of feelings stuck to a project that is going nowhere—hope, denial, loyalty, that sunken ship fallacy… So I am pulling it out and starting anew, hopefully with something that can survive the summer heat.
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