Nature has a way of pacing its bounty

My father was a born storyteller. He could weave the most delightful tales from his imagination, regaling my younger sister and me at bedtime, night after night. A favorite story was “Bells in the Night,” one of the ones that he was able to get published.

The king of the fabled realm of Dunsoon was lying sleepless in bed one night. He heard the first stroke of the bell in the big tower, and counted to twelve. “Ah,” thought the king. “It’s midnight.” But then another clock tower started its clanging. Another count to twelve. And then another clock began chiming, and so on.

The king was terribly bothered by this imprecision. Was it midnight when the first clock began to strike, or when it finished? Or was it when the last clock tolled its own twelfth bell? Such a situation was not to be tolerated. He called for all the clock-keepers in the realm to a meeting; they promised to take care of the problem.

Satisfied, and maybe a bit smug, the king went off to dreamland, only to be vaulted out of sleep by the most dreadful cacophony. Were they being invaded? “Call out the guards! Call out the army!” the king bellowed.

Of course, it turned out that the noise was simply the clanging of all the bells in the kingdom striking at exactly the same time. The king realized his foolishness and asked for things to go back to the way they were.

How does this story relate to gardening? Charlie was away for a week in July, and I found myself swamped by tomatoes and grateful that they don’t ALL ripen at once. And then I started thinking about the reasons why successive ripening is a good thing for people, and wondering what might be in it for plants.

The benefits to people seem pretty obvious: we can count on a steady supply of produce throughout the summer; we don’t have to try and keep up with the output; we don’t have to preserve excess unless we want to; we don’t have a ton of veggies stuffed into our refrigerators because they all needed to be picked at once.

What about from the plants’ point of view? If we start with the premise that the main goal of living entities is to perpetuate the species, it makes good sense to not have all of your offspring mature at the same time.

Continuous blooming and fruit production allow for a better chance of the fruits (and the seeds they contain) to survive.

It’s also possible that bearing all of its fruit at once would put too much stress on a plant; there’s only so much energy a plant produces in a day. With a continuous approach, it’s more likely that each fruit will be larger and healthier than if they all matured at once.

The flip side of this is that if you do want to preserve your harvest, you need to grow enough plants so that you have enough of a quantity at a time to make it worthwhile to set up the canning equipment. Even if you’re going to freeze, it’s easier to blanch vegetables in big batches.

Of course, it’s hard to calculate exactly how much a plant is going to produce—either because it’s more prolific than you expected, because a disease occurs, or because wildlife gets there first. The good news is that with a bumper crop, there are always friends and neighbors who will love it when you share, or a local food cupboard that would be delighted to be able to give fresh produce to its clients.

Pam Baxter is an avid organic vegetable gardener who lives in Kimberton. Direct e-mail to pamelacbaxter@gmail.com, or send mail to P.O. Box 80, Kimberton, PA 19442. Share your gardening stories on Facebook at “Chester County Roots.” Pam’s book for children and families, Big Life Lessons from Nature’s Little Secrets, is available on Amazon, along with her companion field journal, Explore Outdoors, at Amazon.com/author/ pamelabaxter.