How Does Your Garden Grow?

KimB

How Does My Garden Grow? A Failure

This year, like many, I planted a garden. March rolled around and the smell of damp earth and the slightly warmer days indicated the beginning of The Pilgrimages to the Garden Centers was at hand.

Like other years, I planned and schemed how to grow a garden, even though my garden is now reduced to a dozen containers, and coaxing them to yield something akin to the images of the vegetables on the seed packets is still the prime directive.

Unlike other years, of varied results of both success and failures, this year was a doozy.

One popular online tech mag uses the acronym TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance) to describe the myriad failures of modern technology which are only getting more frequent as the quality of software and hardware plummet.

My garden went TITSUP: a complete failure to grow anything at all.

First off, after a brief success getting the tomatoes planted and some bush beans and the never ending attempt to grow potatoes (I'd have starved long ago if I had to live on what potatoes I grow), my back yard irrigation pipe broke.

Actually, the line had been leaking for some time and I paid numerous people to come to find the break and fix it but gosh, not a one would get out a shovel and dig along the pipe line to look for the leak 'cause that's what you have to do to find it: dig along the pipe line.

Finally, I just had to do what everyone has to do when help (paid for or not) is not forth coming: Do It Myself.

So... with great care, as I was recovering from a back injury, I started The Hunt. Ever so S L O W L Y I started at the last known puddle and carefully removed the dirt in the area and LUCK was with me: I found the broken riser on the first go. It had broken at the base and I started down a new educational pathway of learning about PVC Pipes, Risers and their Assorted Accessories.

Having successfully replaced the riser I looked at the others in the garden and decided to replace them too and install new drip top caps.

You know about tech upgrades? You know when you get that message:

There's a new version available.
Upgrade your software.
Install Now?

and there's no way to say "NO!!!!"? Then your PC goes TITSUP and you cannot login to the Support Desk Website ('cause the manufacturer doesn't have phone support) or your not so smart smartphone goes TITSUP and becomes an expensive brick and you no longer qualify for a repair or replacement?

Well... yeppers, TITSUP went the irrigation.

The drip top caps I selected for the top of the risers had several options and never in a minute thinking that anyone would be able to displace them, I set up 2 drip lines for every tree in my back yard. It worked great. Trees were happy. No water flowing places it shouldn't. All looked just hunky dory.

Until, my gardeners made their twice a year foray into the back yard to trim the trees. Heavy duty waffle stompers make short work of cheap plastic parts. My irrigation upgrades were toast. Back to the garden center I went, selecting a completely different sort of cap and installed those.

With the water back ON things looked OK, just before the next TITSUP event: SUMMER.

It was HOT. I mean, HOT. Not HOT as is cool or kewl but HOT as in scorching.

But I figured I had my water timers working and the new lines were working so.. I'm good!

Oh SO WRONG.

My backyard exterior water timer had gone: TITSUP.

And I didn't realize if for a L O N G time. Of course that's the one that ran the water to the garden area.

So... now I had a BIG problem. I'd never dealt with a water timer. You know that thing that the landscape folks install that turns on and off the sprinklers? I've had to set the date and time occasionally but the gardeners generally do all the "programming": A B C programs, Stations 1 2 3 4 5 6, Frequency (we have water restriction days), and other gardener lingo options. My gardeners also have an extreme reluctance to replace anything they didn't install themselves even when I pay them for it. I expect it's because they never know that that OTHER GUY did or didn't do during the original installation and cans of worms being the result. It also impacts the 10 minutes of Mow and Blow scheduling they allot my tiny front yard.

So given the complete indifference of my gardeners to the plight of my newly discovered wilting plants, I made Pilgrimage to the Garden Center to learn about water timers. I had nightmare visions of complicated wires and plugs with E L E C T R I C I T Y (yikes!) but forced myself to face the onslaught of gardener lingo to preserve my poor wilting tomatoes.

Complicated it was. Hard to figure out it wasn't. For once technology was helpful: A big LED screen that had D I R E C T I O N S.

It wasn't long before I had it all sorted and was kicking myself for ever paying anyone to install one of these things again. You still need the pipes run and the valves installed and the base wires pulled near an outlet but the actually water timer is A SNAP. I spent more time trying to attach it to the exterior stucco wall than actually setting up the timer.

I was so impressed by the ease of setting up this timer I went back and bought another one designed to attach to the water spigot so I could run temporary water lines to some flower pots on the patio. No more dragging a hose or hauling a watering can to water the flowers which made my back VERY HAPPY!

So... with all this new water happiness how did the garden go TITSUP?

A power failure.

Nods. Technologies most fundamental flaw: it needs juice. No juice, no tech. Batteries only last so long and then: D E A D.

Without power a PC cannot turn on to log in to the support desk and a dead battery on a smartphone makes it just as bricked as a borked upgrade and a power failure causes water timers to reset to NOTHING and no water happens.

By the time I realized that the timer had crashed, with all that scorching heat, there was nothing left. The promising bush beans had vaporized. Not a green leaf to be seen in the potato pot. The sight of tomato vines draped over the edge of the pot in a laced lattice work of desiccated green lines was just pitiful.

Looking at the desolation of climate change, I had no recourse but to abandon any attempt at garden CPR. I didn't go to the garden area for a longish time. There was nothing there to check. Nothing survived the lack of water and the heat.

Or so I thought.

But you know, life is resilient. It never gives up. Plants have survived droughts and heat and cold for longer than we have. They are rather amazing.

I took a peek at the garden and was stunned.

There were 2 tomato vines struggling along. The plants were still trying. There won't be tomatoes for me but the plants don't know that. They only know to keep trying.

Next to the tomatoes was an eggplant. I thought it had long ago vaporized in the heat. The pot had certainly appeared lifeless but there it was ....

a beautiful eggplant

with flowers

Life lessons: Life is more resilient than technology.

We put one foot in front of the other. We keep trying. We don't always succeed but when we do, when we exceed our own expectations, when we overcome self doubts, when we explore new options and take a chance on new opportunities, when we cast off fear of the unknown then we are rewarded in the most beautiful and unexpected ways.



Kim's Garden 10 2017 Eggplant Flower