A comment to the pictures: two of the pepper plants are late reproducers – it is impossible to picture them as they are loaded with fruit – either you see the fruit, or the plant. You see that these plants begin to shed additional flowers after filling about 30 fruitlets at once. I have had this happen in early reproducers busy with 4 or 6 fruit. In earlier years even if busy only with the single crown flower fruit.

It is not easy to admit for me as an adept of science, that often the outcome of sticking a crooked transplant in a suboptimal space thinking “here is your chance” has outperformed the setting that was intended for perfection. Be it an experiment with a living mulch that fails. Be it hot spells in the greenhouse in a short holiday that ruin a crop or a squirrels that have discovered that they can cross the road after ten years and strip 50m of hazelnuts of their bumper crop that you were dreading to harvest in a mere three days. Or a sudden invasion of uncontrollable insects eating their way through your seed collection that you felt was getting a bit too oversized.

Over the years I have made so often the experience that when my aspiration lost the traction of the capacities and I began to stress myself with the methods, things out of my control appeared to spoil the result. It it through these experiences that I have begun to identify my deep feeling of union and joy about natures beauty prosperity and abundance as the source from which satsifaction comes. Not always success, but gratitude for the process.

Also thinking something is just a boring routine work, has pretty often entailed immediately the lesson that even something as easy as sowing pumpkins can transform into a challenge as even this can fail. (I still do not know exactly why, but “late” (May) sowings into the field often fail here despite a greater warmth and seemingly sufficient moisture).

This is a daily journey for me. I often fail and fall in the trap: I must. Getting more flexible, I see that often the system begins to fill in, if I can not perform a task as I “should”. Still: elegant and seemingly effortless (in the sense of a bird flying) gardening depends on doing the things that are to be done, when they are to be done. And the capacity and flexibility to do so depends a lot on being not overly ambitious or ideological.