I’m not sure what went wrong, if anything. Maybe I’m short on patience. Maybe this is how the cookie crumbles. But I don’t have nearly the number of pea seedlings emerging as I should. Of the three rows of spinach I seeded back in February, there are 2 little plants. It’s been so warm this spring, I figured for sure I’d have better results than this. Maybe I didn’t water them enough, forgetting that all this warm weather meant it wasn’t raining.

In the p-patch, there seem to be only two asparagus crowns left. I can’t find signs of the other four. If it’s really a case of attrition and not just my inability to see tiny asparagus heads, it’s sad that I’ve lost 60% of what I planted. Although, it does mean that perhaps I won’t have to attempt to corral the squash too much this summer. It’s a fruitless task, anyway.

So I’ve pushed soil around the asparagus tips I can see. I’ve reseeded the spinach rows. And I picked up some pea starts at the nursery and planted them along the pea fence where the seedlings I thought I would have by now aren’t.

The onion seedlings and I went out to the p-patch yesterday evening, in a mad rush to do some planting before the sun went down or the forecasted storm arrived. For a while, it hailed what looked like rock salt at me. But the onions, both the tiny seedlings and the larger ones from the nursery are all in. I’m thinking perhaps if I start onions from seed again, I should try deeper starting trays; these poor things are less than half the size of the purchased starts, but their root(s) are all the way to the bottom of the tray. Perhaps they are the tiny things they are because their legroom was so stingy, like how goldfish aren’t supposed to grow unless you give them are large, sparsely occupied bowl.

I’ve read that gardening is about hope. You plant these tiny plants and seeds in the hope that they will feed you later. Right now, I’m thinking gardening is about stubbornness. You plant and replant and weed and reweed out of determination that there will be food. This isn’t hope; this is squeezing life out of barrenness. Or maybe I’m just feeling too cranky these days to see the hope implicit in the stubbornness.