Mossy Cottage Knits

The Semantics of Goal Setting

How could I have forgotten to mention this? A few weekends ago—me ‘n’ blogging, knitting, world-traveling, alpaca-owning veterinarian Mel, in the flesh, sittin’ across the table from each other, yakkin’ up a storm. I never tire of the magic of meeting people through the blog; however, it's undeniably bizarre how you can launch into in-depth, personal conversation as if you’ve known the person for a long time, and yet You’ve Never Met. Kewl but weird; weird but kewl. Sort of Pollyanna meets the Twilight Zone.

Smooches to ya’, Mel. I had a really nice time with you and your friends.

I’m all about Goals this year since otherwise getting out of bed isn’t particularly enticing so, as a neophyte gardener who didn't want to overwhelm herself, I limited my gardening goals to growing:

1. Lettuce
2. Cucumbers
3. Heirloom tomatoes

The lettuce—can’t eat it or give it away fast enough. You know what requires a lot of lettuce? A chef salad. Chef salads demand a big pillow of lettuce to get the right look. You know what requires even more lettuce? A chef salad made in an especially deep bowl. Made one of those the other night in the deepest bowl I could find, practically denuded the lettuce bed in the process…and this is how the bed looks today:

So, with confidence, I can say:

1. Lettuce
2. Cucumbers
3. Heirloom tomatoes

The cucumbers turned out to be a bit of a burr under my saddle. (Hah. Almost wrote, “burr under my salad,” which would've been pretty damn funny.). I did my bit: I bought a healthy, beefy cucumber start, planted it in the soil equivalent of Godiva chocolate, and watered it regularly, even grubbing deeply around in the dirt to make sure the water got to the roots.

The cucumber plant, it grew, oh, how it grew. For months. It earnestly became tall and viny, made lots of luscious leaves, and extruded adorable little tendrils that reached out and wrapped around things. And it produced flowers, volumes of petite, yellow promises of a profuse future harvest. I checked excitedly and expectantly for cucumbers every day, for anything long, green, and cylinder-shaped but, no, just more damn leaves, more damn yellow flowers, more damn adorable tendrils.

That was as of yesterday. Today…I triumphantly present The Completion of Goal #2:

How big is it, you ask? Um, yeah, well… (pardon the dirty fingers but they are come by honestly):

(If I thought for a minute they'd post a picture of a vegetable, I'd submit this to Cute Overload, it's that adorable.)

So the list stood at:

1. Lettuce
2. Cucumbers
3. Heirloom tomatoes

As for the heirloom-tomato goal, much like Clinton’s definition of “sex,” apparently the definitions of "grow," "heirloom tomatoes" and even of "goal" can be twisted to suit your needs.

Detailed goal the first:

Find a tomato start that has “heirloom” on the label and plant it. If it grows at all, even an inch, Bob’s your uncle.

Found three starts—Black Brandywine, English Yellow Perfection and the recently renamed Crows Stole the Label—and planted them, and in a few weeks Bob was very much my uncle (and was, in fact, getting weirdly handsy). Finding myself oddly unsatisfied, I continued the grand experiment to see what else there was to be had. All three plants not only grew but produced tomatoes, so I retroactively expanded the goal to:

Find a tomato start that has “heirloom” on the label, plant it, and get tomatoes to grow on it.

Emboldened by the apparent plasticity of goals, I then further expanded the goal to:

Find a tomato start that has “heirloom” on the label, plant it, get tomatoes to grow on it, and have them ripen.

Got one! Or am at least headed in that direction, as evidenced by this proof of an English Yellow Perfection on its way to becoming yeller:

This yellowness—did it satisfy me? Not in the least. What gives, I thought? The manager in me protested to the universe: I had a clear, well-defined, achievable goal; I met multiple objectives, milestones and timelines, and yet…?

The mystery was solved when today I stumbled across this on Crows Stole the Label:

This, now this tomato filled me with a met-my-goal joy so, apparently, I didn’t want to grow an heirloom tomato as much as I wanted to grow a tomato that was wrinkly and funny shaped, for me the essence of the heirloom look. So, the final goal:

Find a tomato start that has “heirloom” on the label (done), plant it (done), grow a wrinkly, funny-shaped tomato (done), which ripens (screech of brakes).

So, since I have a smooth, round tomato (boo!) that is ripening (yay!) and a wrinkly, funny-shaped tomato (yay!) that is not ripe (boo!), the goal list stands at:

1. Lettuce
2. Cucumbers
3. Heirloom tomatoes (so close I can, pardon the pun, almost taste it)

We have a month of summer (by Seattle standards) to go—and some insanely hot weather expected over the next few days—so stay tuned.

Posted by Ryan at July 23, 2009 11:30 PM