First the Bad News

It's been a long time since I've posted here, and that's mostly because gardening took a turn for the tragic and I just didn't feel up to talking about it. And then, once I had sort of gotten over it, May got busy with catering and a delicious weekend in Cleveland and another bout of allergies-turned-sinus infection-turned bronchitis.
But today, I am on the mend. I'm ready to come clean about the failures, celebrate the successes, and fully cop to the fact that you can plan a garden all you want, but in the end it's gonna be what it wants to be. And that's ok with me.
So....remember all those gorgeous photos of healthy little seedlings, and all those gorgeous photos of the tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and onions and broccolis and cabbages they were going to grow up to be? Well....they're dead. Every single one of them. It could have been the late cold snap, it could have been too much or too little water, too much or too little light, bad juju....I don't know. But one day everything was fine, and the next more than half of the babies were completely flat, yellow, and shriveled. I could have worked harder to save the remainder, I suppose---but once you've had a shock like that it is hard to recover. That represented a lot of time and attention and love and planning and hope and dreams down the toilet. I was pretty damn crestfallen.
I wish I had taken the bull by the horns and just started a whole new batch, but I didn't and now it is mostly too late. I can still start some fall crucifers in a few months, and that will be great. But my awesome variety of heirloom tomatoes and peppers and eggplants are just not going to be this year. Hopefully I can get a few of the varieties I wanted from Garden Dreams, but it may be too late for that too. I had to work all Memorial Day Weekend and missed their big seedling sale. Sigh.
So that's the bad news. Now we'll move on to the good news, and the life lesson....