This comes every year and yet I still feel ill-prepared for the boredom and longing that always wretches my gut.
Nothing is green, everything is dead, and the world around me is frozen, covered in ice, and seems deadly still. Meanwhile I’m stuck indoors avoiding canning the 400 lbs of tomatoes in my deep freezer and hoping my onions make it one more day before turning to mush. They’re doing great by the way.
Such is life. We start the garden season with such excitement and such lofty goals, surely attainable, just to go through the season slowly being beat down by one mistake or another bug or disease. Until finally, September or October (if you’re lucky) rolls around and we can justify letting the garden “go to the bugs”. Not but two months later, ready to roll out the garden seeds and planning materials and do it all over again.
Gardening and homesteading are not easy. They take serious effort and a willingness to lose and to suck and to fail over and over again in hopes that one year, you will win. And to its credit, if you fail enough, you will eventually win. It may only be one good carrot, or it may be 120 lbs of onions that you planted hoping HALF would come up. Now you have to learn how to dehydrate and make as much onion powder as possible so all of that work and effort doesn’t go to waste.
It is worth it, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Because it is. When family comes to visit and you get to make mashed potatoes from all homegrown potatoes. Or when you get to make your brother a carrot cake with carrots you grew from seed. Or, and this is my favorite, when you get to watch your 1-year-old daughter pluck the freshest tomato off of the vine and begin devouring it as if it were the largest strawberry. It is worth it, but man is that hard to remember at the end of the season.
Alas we wait again. We wait for the renewing of the earth and the weather and the excitement that comes with it all. New Years has nothing on a new garden season.
Merry Christmas everybody. May your seed catalogs be delivered soon ❤
Hoffmann Homestead 
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