plan B

I took this picture in April, upon receiving a package in the mail from Johnny’s full of sweet potato slips that looked awful. Crumpled and wilty and sad. Really awful. I figured that if we needed to call and ask for a refund, we could also send the pictures as evidence of how truly awful they looked.

But the call never happened. We put the slips in the seed starter frame in the greenhouse, watered them religiously, and they came back. Not right away. Almost imperceptibly slowly, over the course of weeks. In the end, we sold most of them down at the stand and kept just a few for ourselves to grow, for fun.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, there’s no way of knowing one way or the other. The plants we pour our hearts into can prove incredible resilient or simply unable to hack it. The tomatoes at Sepiessa could go either way. We already have so much sunk into them, and they still need to be irrigated and mulched, which will take a long time. But we have the drip tape ready to go, the mulch in bales by the deer fence.

So we’re going to save half - the better looking half - and till the others in. A compromise, if you will. We’ll replant the space with something that’ll come up quick - probably salad greens we can sell to restaurants. It’s painful to watch the rows go under, but it’s all part of it, and we knew that when we started, when we opened the seed catalogue and started talking. It’s kinda like baseball. From year to year you can win a lot, but you can’t win ‘em all.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to lose.