I should clarify: I like the idea of gardening. Fresh vegetables, hands in soil, that whole connection-to-the-earth thing. My actual gardening experience consisted of some basil plants in college that I killed through aggressive overwatering.

But I was optimistic. I watched YouTube videos. I read articles about companion planting and soil amendments. I ordered heirloom tomato seeds from a catalog like I knew what I was doing.

April: Enthusiasm

The first Saturday in April, I showed up at plot 7B with a new shovel, gloves that still had the tags on, and confidence I had not earned. The plot was twenty feet by ten feet of compacted clay with some dead grass trying to pass as topsoil.

I started digging. Five minutes in, I'd made a depression about two inches deep and my shoulders were already tired. The clay was like concrete. My brand-new shovel bounced off it.

Elena wandered over from plot 4A, coffee in hand, clearly amused. "You know you need to amend that, right?"

"Amend it?"

"The soil. It's pure clay. Nothing's growing in that without help." She sipped her coffee, watching me struggle. "You got compost?"

I did not have compost. I didn't know where to get compost. Elena sighed like she was already regretting getting involved, then walked me to the communal pile by the shed. "Take as much as you need. Mix it in, maybe three inches deep. It'll help."

Turns out "as much as you need" was seventeen wheelbarrow trips. My back hurt for three days. But the soil looked better—darker, crumblier, more like what I'd seen in the videos.

May: Reality

I planted everything in mid-May: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, beans, lettuce. Went a little overboard, maybe. The plot looked sparse at first, all those tiny seedlings in neat rows with space between them.

"You're gonna have problems in about six weeks," Tom predicted, inspecting my work. "Zucchini spreads. So do cucumbers. And you planted them way too close."

I told him I followed the spacing guidelines from the internet. He just smiled. "Okay."

He was right. By late June, my neat rows had become a tangled jungle. The zucchini plants had staged a hostile takeover of the cucumber territory. The tomatoes were falling over because I'd staked them too loosely. The lettuce had bolted in the heat, gone bitter and tall.

And the rabbits. Oh, the rabbits.

Gardening is mostly just losing to nature in increasingly creative ways, then figuring out how to lose slightly less next time. —  Tom, plot 3B, reluctant garden mentor

I lost an entire row of beans overnight. Came out one morning to find them chewed to nubs. Sarah recommended chicken wire. I bought some, spent a Sunday afternoon building a fence that looked like it was designed by someone who'd never seen geometry. It worked, though. The rabbits moved on to someone else's plot.

July: The Zucchini Problem

Nobody warns you about zucchini. The plants were monsters—huge leaves, sprawling vines, and fruit that seemed to materialize overnight. I'd harvest three squash, turn my back for two days, and find five more the size of baseball bats.

I tried to give them away. Brought them to Bill's Sunday porch gatherings. "Anyone want zucchini?"

"We all have zucchini, Maya," Bill said gently. "It's July. Everyone has too much zucchini."

I learned to make zucchini bread, zucchini fritters, zucchini noodles, zucchini everything. I still had too much. Finally started leaving them in a box by the road with a "FREE" sign. They disappeared, which either means people took them or the rabbits got really ambitious.

Emma showed up at my plot one evening in late July, wielding a basket. "Teach me how you got your tomatoes to actually produce," she demanded. "Mine are all leaves, no fruit."

I had no idea. Mine just...worked? We compared notes. Turns out she'd overfertilized—too much nitrogen, all the energy went to foliage. Meanwhile, I'd barely fertilized at all and gotten lucky.

We sat in my chaotic plot, eating sun-warm cherry tomatoes straight off the vine, and she told me about her own garden failures: the year she planted only hot peppers and couldn't give them away fast enough, the season she tried to grow corn and raccoons got every single ear.

"Gardening makes you humble," she said. "Or it makes you quit. Either way, you learn something."

August: What Worked

By August, I'd gotten into a rhythm. Water in the early morning. Check for pests. Harvest what was ready. Accept that some things wouldn't work no matter what I did—the peppers stayed small and bitter, the cucumbers got some kind of wilt disease I couldn't diagnose.

But the tomatoes kept coming. The beans recovered and produced a second wave. The zucchini never stopped, which was both a blessing and a curse.

Wednesday evenings became informal garden time. We'd all drift out to our plots after dinner—Bill, Elena, Tom, Sarah, Emma, sometimes Jacob if he wasn't traveling for work. Not organized, just what happened. We'd work our own spaces but wander between plots, sharing tools, trading tips, complaining about the weather.

Tom taught me how to properly sucker tomatoes. Sarah showed me her trick for keeping basil from flowering too early. Elena and I collaborated on a terrible cucumber trellis that somehow held together through windstorms. Bill mostly just observed, offering cryptic advice like "plants do what they want" and "next year you'll know."

September: Harvest

I pulled my first real carrot in September. It was knobby, forked, nothing like the perfect specimens from the grocery store. But I'd grown it from a seed the size of a grain of sand, and when I brushed off the dirt and bit into it, it tasted sweet and earthy and impossibly fresh.

That night I made a salad entirely from plot 7B: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, with basil I'd somehow kept alive. It was the best salad I'd ever eaten, partly because it tasted good and partly because I'd earned every single ingredient.

We had a harvest potluck the last Sunday in September. Everyone brought something from their plots. Tom made salsa. Elena contributed about forty hot peppers arranged in order of heat level. Sarah made a ratatouille that used up everyone's excess zucchini. I brought caprese skewers with my tomatoes and basil from the SILK Cafe garden.

Bill surveyed the spread—two tables full of food, all from our scrappy little plots behind the cottages. "Not bad for a bunch of amateurs," he said.

"Speak for yourself," Elena countered. "I've been gardening for years."

"And yet you still plant your tomatoes too close together," Tom pointed out.

She threw a cherry tomato at him. He caught it and ate it. We all laughed.

What the Garden Actually Taught Me

I didn't become some zen gardener with perfect rows and abundant harvests. My plot remained chaotic, my yields unpredictable, my knowledge incomplete. But I learned to be okay with that.

Gardening isn't about control—it's about collaboration with forces bigger than you. Weather, soil, seasons, pests, luck. You do your part, nature does what it wants, and if you're lucky, you get tomatoes.

The better lesson was about people. We didn't plan to build community in those garden plots. We just showed up to grow vegetables and ended up growing friendships. Turned out that asking for help when your rabbits eat your beans, or offering advice when someone's tomatoes fail, or sharing the ridiculous abundance of July zucchini—that's what makes neighbors into something more.

I'm already planning for next spring. Fewer zucchini plants, definitely. Maybe actual corn if I can figure out how to outsmart the raccoons. Better stakes for the tomatoes. Elena says she'll help me build raised beds over the winter if I help her rewire her pottery studio. Tom's saving me seeds from his best beans.

Plot 7B will probably still be chaotic. I'm fine with that. The chaos is kind of the point.

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