Gardens Have A Tendency To Flourish While You’re Vacationing
As summer vacation time approaches, let us take a look ahead at the home gardener’s own “Law of Diminishing Returns.”
Stated simply, the law reads:
“Your best vegetables mature while you are on vacation and are diminishing by the time you return.”
It always has seemed to me that sweet corn and muscadine grapes are particularly prone to fool their grower like that.
The little-known agrarian law, perhaps never before put in writing, is closely related to two more famous ones: the Peter Principle which recognizes that toast always lands jelly-side down, and the ironclad dictum of government bureaucracy that any job no matter how small expands to fill the time available to complete it.
In gardening, it makes not one bit of difference whether you take your vacation early, middle or late in the summer. You can depend upon the vegetables and fruits that you like best to reach perfection in your absence and to be declining when you get home.
Odds are, too, that your neighbors will not have picked and used a single thing. Never mind that, before you left, you urged them to help themselves and got their earnest pledges that they would see to the harvest. I know of a few notable exceptions, but not many.
When the gardener makes such generous offers of free-for-the-picking vegetables, he’s not always doing it out of the sheer goodness of his heart.
Every experienced gardener knows you need to keep the tomatoes and beans picked and the okra cut, or else the plants will mature a few fruits, assume they have arranged for their future lineage and virtually cease work for the rest of the season.
One spring, a gardening partner of mine worked and sweated for 10 weeks to grow a patch of fancy, experimental sweet corn that was new to everybody.
He did everything right and had the corn growing perfectly when he and his family left for three weeks in the mountains. We were sure it would not be ready to pick before they got back. But the new kind of corn sped up its growth and hastily matured all at once while they were gone.
I gave away his corn by the bushel, at the office, in the neighborhood and sometimes to virtual strangers. No point in letting it get too hard, right?
Everyone agreed that the experimental corn was a success, crisp, plump and sweetly delicious and, best of all, free and requiring no work. It was a year later, after another springtime growing season, that the corn’s sponsor finally got to sample his experiment.
A colleague at the newspaper where I once worked loafed in the shade while his neighbor grew a row of fine tomatoes. When the gardener went on vacation, the tomatoes hurriedly ripened by the dozens.
The harvest was distributed generously by the shade-tree friend; when the owner came back, the patch was down to a three-aday dribble of second-rate tomatoes.
My colleague, however, got a taste of the same medicine. When he left on vacation later that summer, his eggplants reached their peak of ripeness and were harvested by several willing neighbors.
Not often will you see the Law of Diminishing Returns work in such a perfect circle of justice. But you can see it in half-circle any time.
Like this summer, for instance, when you take your two weeks off.