It's Alive!
Welcome to Saturday Stories….
This year I expanded my gardening, turning my backyard into a miniature farmstead. Last winter I received a catalog from the Baker Seed Company. Whoever puts it together knows what they are doing. Their pictures and descriptions of the vegetables and flower seeds they sell made me want one of each. I didn’t go that far, but I did order a lot.
Once the seeds arrived, I turned our spare bedroom into a seed-starting nursery. I had ordered numerous varieties of tomato plants and started way more plants than I needed. As it was, it turned out to be a good thing. Once I started transplanting them into the garden the trouble began.
One particular area became exceedingly troublesome. I would put the tomato plants out and within a day or two they would be gone, cut off at the base. I would replant, and repeat the same trouble. Finally, I caught the culprit. A rabbit was indulging in my tasty tomatoes. So, I made some small cages out of hardware cloth and that solved that problem.
Then, I had to deal with the spring wind storms. One of my tomato plants, of the Purple Bee variety, was doing exceedingly well. It was growing and seemed quite healthy. But after a storm blew through one night in May, I went out to find it had blown over and was broken off right at ground level.
My first instinct was to pull it up and replant, but I was busy and decided I would deal with it later. Later turned out to be about a week afterwards. But when I went to deal with it, I found that it had not turned brown and shriveled as I expected it would be. It was still green and seemed to be thriving.
On further inspection, I realized that although it was broken at the base, it was not completely severed and was still drawing water and nutrients from its root system. I decided to give it a chance at life. Instead of pulling it up, I staked it up, fertilized it, and gave it some water.
It survived and thrived, becoming one of the better tomato plants in the garden.
Not everything that gets broken by life’s storms is irredeemable.
If it can stay connected to its roots, even just a little, it has a chance to survive and thrive.
