Drought

Every year of this cancer journey, I’ve found a reflection of my physical state in the life of my garden. I have always seen the cancer as akin to a noxious weed, something that just keeps coming back and which one has to treat again and again with poisons to get rid of.

For years, I maintained a very large vegetable garden, but last summer it officially became too much for me. Depleted by my third round of chemotherapy, which went right through June and whose side effects were worst in May, I had trouble managing the planting, watering, and weeding required. I have five beds out in the greenhouse, a fair distance from our house, and it was a real chore to get out there and maintain the more finicky plants, the tomatoes and eggplant. Still, it was a good year.

At the end of the season, we ripped out that garden, thinking that area would be replaced by a large shed for the heritage pigs we’re going to get to root in the woodlands. However, after more consideration, the hog barn got relocated to another spot closer to the woods. Still, I don’t miss those 15 raised beds. This year I had one, close to the house and the hoses. This was also the first year I had chemotherapy right through the summer, after a 9-month break instead of the usual 6-month break. I just had treatment #5 of 6. Six is about all a person can take before a break is required (and after that, the treatments also start to show diminishing returns).

This summer has been one of the most challenging seasons for growers on record. We are in an extreme drought. In 13 years here on the farm, 16 in the area, I’ve not seen anything like it. The ponds are dry, something I thought was impossible given our water table. My husband dug up some deer-ravaged bushes by the house and regraded the area to help push rainwater away from the house, and in a month not a single weed has sprung up. It is astonishing to walk on that bare ground every day to go feed the chickens or water the garden.

Fields of corn that often get spiky but always survive have dried up, shrunken, in the fields. Soybean fields have burned up. And though we have had food from the garden, there have been many more flowers than fruit. The plants spring to life, then start shedding their flowers, shriveling up, hardly producing. Bugs rush in to devour the weakened plants. After a couple weeks and a successful fight against the striped cucumber beetles, the zucchini succumbed to squash borers and squash bugs. The one butternut squash plant that survived has a single fruit on it, despite its many early flowers. The shishito peppers, after a first yield, are full of giant seeds. The cucumbers, too, are full of seeds. Everything is trying to reproduce, turning its attention to next year. Even the tomatoes, on eight plants, are coming in a tomato at a time, or producing none at all. The tomatillo plant put out a bunch of husks the size of ground cherries, then shriveled up and died.

I have been too sick to water. For an entire week after treatment, now more like 10 days, I can’t even get out to the greenhouse. My husband has done some, and the peppers in truth are thriving under the automatic watering system. But even they shrivel up shortly after I bring them into the house. The cantaloupe, also plentiful, get soft while still unripe. Nothing has water in its cells. Everything is fragile. I can relate.

At this point my visualization of what can happen is much like the bare earth by the house. I want to so bombard the cancer with these poisons that it just loses strength and gives up, if not forever then for a long time. I had a friend who after ten years with ovarian cancer stopped treatment when a spot appeared in her pancreas. And yet she continued to live for two more years without symptoms or spread. To me it just felt like she had so weakened the cancer it struggled to get a hold. However, I am also aware, by then her short-term and long-term memory were shot, a major and to me the most disturbing side effect of so much chemotherapy. The drought doesn’t just affect the weeds.

Home with my harvest and my seriously compromised taste buds, I struggle to find the energy and motivation to chop it all up, stuff it and bake it and serve it. I’m only keeping up because, in fact, there is less of it.

It is time to plant the fall lettuce and greens. But I’m not putting in any seeds until there’s at least one rainfall of an inch or more. Watering with the hose is never the same as rain.

This season is barren. But for me, knowing part of the hope is a barrenness that stops the weeds, not just the fruit, I can live into it. We have so much prairie outside our windows that even now the goldenrod is blooming (and occasional bursts of sunflowers or coneflowers) and there is green. Whereas for much of the area, where there is grass or cultivated crops, everything is brown, here something is blooming.

Here something is blooming.