Tardy to the Party

The dahlias are in the ground!

On one of my first dates with Matt, he mentioned how farming is in large part a gamble.  Every year you lay it all out on the table - seed, man-hours, machinery, opportunity cost - and hope for a near perfect hand to make the whole thing work.  Organic farms have an even trickier row to hoe.

I thought he was being dramatic (or trying to impress me.)  What is so hard about sprouting a seed?  Or a million of them?  Put it in the ground.  Wait for rain and sun.  Harvest in fall.  Maybe join a bowling league.  Nature has designed this keystone of life to be fool-proof.

I was dead wrong in that naive assessment.

My garden patch rocked last year (beginner's luck) and was such a proud accomplishment (especially for a late-to-life-gardening-convert.)  Blooms galore!  Anxious to make the sophomore album even hotter than the debut, I couldn't wait to get back into the dirt (okay, soil, not dirt!)

Well.  Wait I did.  And wait more.

The rain, cold, fist-shakingly-long winter kept the soil too cold for my dahlia tubers and too wet for any meaningful ground prep (thanks a million to Matt's brother Josh for taking time from his real farming to disc, till and smooth over the best looking garden anywhere!)  The result of this chilly fluke of nature?  I was a full month behind my planting schedule!

Kiowa and Dahlia.  Best friends.

But...Keep Calm and Carry On is in vogue once more for a good reason.

The garden is planted and my babes are in the race.  Hopefully (as nature tends to do) those little tubers will fight past their late start and grow doubly as fast, stepping-quick to grow into the fiercest bloom anywhere come mid-August.

Until then my flower-istas, solidarity as we work with nature to coax her best traits forward!

p.s. I'll be a more responsible blogger this summer and provide timelier updates on how my garden grows!

p.p.s.  The photo is of my dahlias planted.  With cultivars loving named things like Sugartown Sunrise,  Spartacus, Ivory Palaces and Sierra Glow, you betcha that I gotta keep 'em all straight with bamboo markers and name-tags!

p.p.p.s.  Yes.  I did say Tardy to the Party.