“Oh, shit,” Nick said, pushing his way through the overgrown ferns and thorny outstretched branches of the rose bush. “This is going to suck.”

And suck it did.

Between all our weekends of busyness and the rain and mist and sporadic bursts of sunshine over the past month, the garden went from a meager plot filled with potential to an unwieldy mess of weeds and despair.

The last time we’d been by to weed, the garlic was going strong and radishes had just begun to sprout, and there were early signs of turnips and maybe chard. In not long at all, the radishes went to seed and turned out to be inedible, and the only things that survived are the turnips, the garlic, three purple kholrabi plants, and two struggling carrots. There might be a beet or two sprouting, but it doesn’t look good.

Nick said his best swears as he yanked unidentifiable greenery out from among our withering crops, and I made him promise we’d come back next Friday with seeds and maybe a few pepper or tomato plants and try to recoup some of our losses. He grunted something incoherent and asked for the bottle of water I’d just finished. It’s not too late to try again, is it?

This gardening stuff does not get easier just because you have a year of it behind you. Sure, we planted deep enough and far enough apart, and early enough in the season. There’s more to it, apparently, like regular supervision and a lot of bending over and pulling. I assume that by next year we’ll be experts, as it turns out we’ve still got a whole bunch of that pain-in-the-ass learning to do.

Next year.

Right.