Waiting

“Garten heisst Warten” – a German phrase I coined a few years back in my Swiss garden. It means that gardening is mostly about waiting:

Waiting until you can plant stuff.
Waiting for stuff to grow.
Waiting for stuff to bloom.
Waiting for stuff to ripen so you can eat it.
Waiting for next year.

Here, in English and in the new garden, the phrase may have lost its rhyme but not its meaning. There’s even more kinds of waiting in the new garden: Waiting to see what will survive winter and spring with humid soil and maybe a deeper than expected frost. Waiting to see what will survive the hot and dry summer and come back in September. Waiting to buy and plant more of the stuff that works.

I am not a patient person. Maybe I shouldn’t be gardening. Maybe I should so I can learn some patience. So far it hasn’t worked.
Because sometimes I just can’t wait. I will bite my fingernails until I can finally sow tomatoes & Co.. This year I held out until February. And planted some of the seedlings out these last few days. It was 20 degrees and sunshine after all and no more very cold nights were forecasted. Of course the forecast has since been adjusted.
I have some reserves in the little plastic greenhouse on the terrasse… And maybe, just maybe plants are a lot tougher than we give them credit for. We’ll have to wait and see. In any case I will be mothering my seedlings with protective fleece and buckets next week… Because I just can’t wait.