We are back with an update on Brandi’s garden. Everyone is doing much better! After being faced with some major setbacks, this family needed some help. I took a look at the situation and realized that despite the really tall grass, the food was doing ok and there was a lot of it! It helped a lot that this garden was well planed and organized. Everything was loaded you just couldn’t get to it or hardly see it without going full jungle mode. If we could open it up with mowing and hand weeding, it could be saved and the season could actually go on quite well!
A little group of three families formed among us. We organized shifts to properly distance ourselves from any potential Covid exposure and took turns as families to weed and mow. My kids are great garden helpers but they really put it into high gear for this one and did so on their own. I was proud of them for that and proud of the Hunt and Bolton families for stepping up as well.
After a couple days of being overwhelmed and not really being able to put my thoughts into words, I think I am at a point I can finally make some progress.
You guys saw my post about my jungle of a garden and the pictures that made me feel like a complete failure. I was completely overwhelmed at the support and contact I received wanting to help me and my family. So project “Save This Season” began.Jason contacted me to see what the best plan of attack was. I suggested he come by and take a look because at that point I thought it was a complete loss. He came by Friday evening and we decided it just needed to be mowed, yes, mowed, and try to salvage whatever food I could for the rest of the season. Bill contacted me Friday as well. I told him if he wanted to get with Jason to see what he thought he was more than welcome but as of that point, i was finding someone to mow it for me and I would do what I could do to save what I could for the rest of this harvest season. I got “Oh no! I’ll get in touch with Jason.”Saturday, I got a call from Jason and he said that they had planned 2 separate visits, one for Saturday evening and one for Sunday morning. I was totally taken aback that they had decided to help me try their best to “Save This Season”.Saturday evening, around 7, Jason and his sons showed up. I have never seen 3 people work as hard as they did for 2 hours. They accomplished so much! Rows were mowed, cleaned out by hand, and some are even back to dirt! Jason made sure to fertilize before they were finished for the night. We decided my tomatoes were probably too heavy to stake at this point and to get what I could was good enough for me. My garden actually looked like a garden again!Sunday morning around 7:30, Bill and his wife and children showed up. They brought me cucumbers! They harvested green beans, cleaned ALL the weeds out of my corn, pulled some more weeds in random places in the garden, and gave me some suggestions and recipes! Before they left, Bill said one thing to me that has echoed through my mind since he left. I told him, as I had told Jason the night before, I didn’t know how I could ever repay them for the help they had given me and my family. Bill’s words to me were “we’re all in this together”.Those words ring true in so many things going on today. In being the first in this garden program, in trusting that we have each others’ back, in keeping each other and our families safe from this crazy virus and this crazy world we are living in today.I did have other offers of help, and I may take you up on it before this is all over but for now the boys and families did an amazing job this weekend!Today, my husband went and bought a tripod sprinkler because the soaker hose just isn’t working. It sprays more water out the connection point than it puts out the hose. The tripod sprinkler works…but needs some adjustment…we also decided that we were going to try to stake the tomatoes! I still can’t squat or do a lot and my husband’s fatigue is still quite bad. But after all the work we saw these “strangers” put into our garden, we pushed ourselves….hard…and staked our tomatoes! They may not be the best staked tomatoes and they may not look the best, but by golly we got them staked! That is a huge accomplishment for us!So today, I want to say Thank You, not only for the help with my family’s garden, but for the motivation to push ourselves harder than we have in a long time. Thank you for caring, thank you for not judging us because of our situation. Thank you for being the amazing people that you are! You truly have hearts the size of Texas!
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