Early this summer, my son and I excitedly dropped little seeds into the dirt bed of our new backyard vegetable garden. As a novice grower, I had high hopes and low expectations, but soon enough, little green sprouts started popping up out of the soil. Just inside neatly labeled plots we started learning what the different growth stages of beans, cauliflower, spinach, onions, and bell peppers looked like.
After a couple of months, cucumbers and tomatoes climbed around on vines, beans hung discreetly under leaves, and bees were sleeping in summer squash blossoms. The products of my cauliflower, spinach, and bell pepper plants were noticeably less obvious. My husband noted that some of them looked like weeds, and we laughed it off and kept watering.
I showed off my garden to everyone who would see it. Family, friends, neighbors—no one was immune. Guess I have a kind of green thumb. No big deal.
After harvesting our first vegetables, my patience gave out, and I looked up the growth stages of my seemingly underperforming crops. Shockingly, they were nothing like what I had been witnessing. To my great surprise and embarrassment, the thriving plants in my lovely raised bed were in fact weeds.
Instantly, and with not just a little bit of resentment, I pulled out the roots of the plants I had been diligently watering all season. Turns out, it’s really easy to stop caring for a thing when you realize how cruelly it’s been deceiving you.
I think about this now as I see stories of former MAGA supporters turning on Trump, and I imagine a new kind of reckoning. As indisputable evidence hits home for more and more Americans, I can see them uprooting him from their lives with ease.
Where he was nurtured and given the benefit of the doubt before, I see him finding hostile ground. Where he was allowed to grow and spread and feel like he could take over everything around him, I see him being spurned. I can see him discovering that people are watching closely—and knowingly— to make sure he doesn’t invade their lives again.
In place of my well-watered weeds, I carefully planted a new batch of seeds with both the humility and the confidence only gained with the experience of such a grand failure. Though the empty summer garden bed was a valuable missed opportunity, I know a new season of planting is right around the corner, and now, I am a gardener walking into it with a wider perspective and fresh expectations of goodness.
With love and hope for the future,
Stephanie Lovely
What is your most embarrassing gardening failure?
Gardening Failure - I can't find the will to prevent deer from eating my crops. They are lovely and always have fawns in tow. So I enjoy their enjoyment.
"Trump is just a well-watered weed" says it all. And now I can identify the common weeds that grow around my house in their earliest stages and pluck them out while still small! But the sunflower to the left I use as my substack picture was a volunteer that grew in a pot that once contained herbs years prior. It grew from a single stem into a beautiful flower where there had been nothing for years. I hope we get some of those in November!