Hope sprouts from tour of struggling garden plot

TO OUR READERS: This is the sixth in a monthly series on vegetable gardening for the beginner, featuring second-year gardener Dave Philipps. “Gardening with Dave” appears the third Thursday of the month through the growing season, with updates at gazettegarden.blogspot.com.

Ever notice it takes the imminent arrival of house guests to make you realize how filthy your kitchen is?

It’s no different with a garden.

This has been a dismal summer for my little kitchen plot, where I try to grow the most produce with the least amount of effort.

By August most of the exotic experiments I planted — the tender fava beans, the slender Japanese egg plants, the sweet little lemon cucumbers — looked as if I’d planted them on the moon.

The tender oak leaf lettuce that was so luscious in June had turned tough and gone to seed.

The snow peas of spring were long gone, and the few, sad bushes of green beans I’d planted in their place hardly seemed worthwhile when plump green beans could be had for $1 per pound at the market.

But I hadn’t really noticed how dreary everything looked until a few weeks ago, when I got a call from the program director of the Colorado Springs Garden Club, reminding me that the ladies of the club would be coming to tour my garden.

Cut to scenes of panicking.

I have two small raised beds in front of my house, where I’m in the second year of an experiment to see if I can produce a veggie garden that offers a maximum of produce and pleasure with a minimal investment of time and money.

By August, it was clear I hadn’t invested enough.

The garden club’s visit only put an exclamation point on the quiet malaise of weeds and bug-nibbled basil.

I knew the ladies would be too well brought up, too classy, to audibly tut-tut as I tried to stretch what should be a five-minute eulogy into a half-hour tour.

But I could imagine how they’d politely skewer me over lunch, afterward.

“Maybe you could just make a trip to the nursery and plant a few things before they get here,” a friend suggested.

It wasn’t a bad idea, but this time of year all the starter pots of vegetables are long gone.

I figured I should at least pull out the larger weeds before they came, but that just thinned out the heartiest greenery in the garden, making it look even barer.

It was clear I was going to look like an idiot — something I try, pretty unsuccessfully, to avoid.

As I stood there, just hours before the club’s arrival, I thought, “Oh well, at least this will make them feel better about their own gardens.”

Promptly at 9:15 last Thursday morning, they arrived — a dozen ladies wearing light summer linens and sandals that tastefully matched their pocketbooks.

One was a local herb specialist. One judged competitions of irises and day lilies. One had been vegetable gardening her whole life. I knew I was pickled.

But actually, the ladies were the model of civility. If they were secretly judging the brown lettuce and skimpy, hail-beaten tomatoes, they gave no sign.

“How much time a day do you spend gardening?” they asked.

About 10 to 15 minutes.

“And it’s all organic?”

Yes. No chemicals.

“Don’t people steal things from your garden with it sitting right out on the sidewalk?”

“No one ever has. In fact,” I said, “gardening out in the front yard has given me a chance to meet neighbors I wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

After an hour of chatting and tasting the few tomatoes I had, the ladies set off for the next garden on the tour.

And as they did, I realized they had inadvertently done something very helpful.

I had been ready to give up on my garden, but in the scurry to make it look presentable before they came, I remembered that there is still a whole season of gardening just starting.

Although it hardly feels like it now, August is the beginning of the cool season. It’s time again to plant lettuce, peas, radishes, spinach and broccoli. I tore out wizened brown lettuce and snow peas, and planted new seeds.

By September, the sad old garden of August will — with a little more effort on my part — be hidden by a new bounty.

Sometimes, it’s good to invite guests over, if for no other reason than to do a good cleaning.