As another Colorado winter faded and we dug into planning the eighth season of Grow, I turned 50a milestone that comes with truckloads of compost, and I don’t mean the good kind.
So when a best pal whose birthday had fallen during a business trip asked me how I wanted to celebrate, all I could do was sputter ambivalent inanities. I asked about her own birthday, and she said she didn’t want to infringe on “my” day. But somehow, when I thought about a shared celebration, my gloom lifted. I felt as if I’d walked smack into a sunbeam, warmed and comfortable and incomparably lucky.
When we found a mutual friend was turning 25, that was just icing on the party. Like a crocus bulb in the dark, I still don’t know what’s planned for the triple birthday bash. But it’s going to be killer fun, and I’m gonna laugh until my gut aches.
It was a great reminder of what gardening is all about: what you give comes back and many things about gardening are better shared.
While I like an hour or two alone, weeding or seeding at dusk with the insects humming and the vines rustling, just as much as the next gardener, the harvest is about putting a whole lot of chairs at a great big table. An armload of flowers or vegetables should be savored with friends of all varieties, and so should their amazing progress. A close-up photo of a gleaming green wasp, her antennae peeping demurely around an eggplant blossom, deserves an audience as big as her charms.
Even the most introverted of gardeners needs to give voice to their stories of bugs, blooms, bruises and berries. Those tales are the heart of the harvest, food for souls. The hail-scarred trees in Arvada that reliably pump out baskets of plums are one kind of miracle, but the little old German ladies who come each summer to scoop up the fruit for plum kuchen are surely another.
We have bushels to share with you this season in Grow, and we fervently hope you’ll share back at , at the Digging In blog, and in our “Show Us Your Bloomers” flower- photo contest (we’ll have more details on it in a future issue).
Editor Emeritus Dana Coffield will once again take you up close and personal with what’s happening in her garden all season. Marcia Tatroe will continue sharing her wisdom every week (she’s on Page 10L this issue, but she’ll return to her regular spot next week).
So get ready for an amazing year. We’ll dig and weed and plant and mulch and prune and pluck and dream together. Sometimes we’ll curse and sometimes we’ll stomp, and we’ll surely stretch and groan. We’ll toast sunsets and sore muscles and gentle, soaking rains, late into the long, summer nights.
We’ll have cubic yards of fun, and I hope we’ll laugh until our guts ache.
Welcome to the party.
Susan Clotfelter, Grow editor
