Today the garden woke up happy. I mixed in my fertilizer in the watering bucket, and did my usual rounds of dipping the cottage container into the bucket and feeding the base of each plant individually. I looked around, trying to see if any of the plants were willing to be named this morning, when I noticed that my big first-row tomato plant, the one in the bottom left corner of the garden picture from earlier, started flowering!
And so, I've decided to name it Cain, as it was the first to be born. Excited by this development, I decided to go check the pubescence of the rest of my tomato plants, and found a barely-budding flower on the tomato plant in the big purple planter. I will name this tomato plant Abel.
A lot of small things happen in the garden, and sometimes I don't even notice them. I've long stopped being able to keep track of individual leaves, but I've also been missing out on the growth spurts.
My neighbour Sylvano, a burly Italian man with a green thumb and a black finger from all of the cigarettes he goes through, takes care of the garden next door, and has been giving me advice. When I first started out, he lent me some tools to dig up the garden, and some compost to help the plants adjust, but he also gave me planting and spacing advice for the plants (which I ignored, leading to Zuko's exile). One of the things he mentioned was that I should dig a trench system to drain the garden if it floods.
Normally, this would be no issue, but in this case, the evestrough drains into a pipe that sends it far away from the house foundation and directly into the garden. So all of the rain that falls on the house drains right into the plants. Today was the first test for these trenches, and they held!
Well, sort-of. I was cycling home while the downpour was happening, and could not moniter the garden. While I was gone, Sylvano, reaching over the fence with a rake, deepened the main trench, preventing pooling at the far end of the garden. When I arrived, soaking wet to the bone, I came out and dug a new trench just beside the cucumber corridor. It was still not enough, and the plants closest to the house were flooded.
The garlic could handle it just fine, and the pepper plant was an extra anyway (this pepper plant, in the corner of the garden patch, is now called Extra), but I was worried about the smaller cherry tomato plant that got flooded. Only time will tell if it will survive the flood, but as long as it's still standing, I will name it Noah.
After cleaning the dirt from my hands, and after a change of clothes, I returned to the garden later in the day to examine the damage. The water was gone -- soaked through into the earth, and no plants were swept away. With no rainbow as covenant, the trenches still hold strong in case they will be needed again.