“You have to cut back on the garden this year,” my wife said.

I nod and smile. Of course I will (won’t.)

Honey has to share part of the blame because of her no-kill philosophy about the spring vegetable and flower plants she starts in our house under, as she puts it, 16 feet of grow lights. Each little plant is her child. She talks to them, praising those who prosper, worrying over the weak ones, reassuring those undergoing transplantation.

She plants carefully according to our needs, but always has extras. She finds homes for most of the surplus; still, I end up putting more in the garden because neither of us can stand to throw away young plants whose only fault is not being wanted. It offends our frugal and sentimental natures.

“I don’t know what this tomato is; maybe a yellow Brandywine,” Honey told me, pointing out a lone tomato seedling that came up in a flat of zinnias.

In a commercial greenhouse a stray like that would be heartlessly plucked out. The Brandywine family of tomatoes have broad leaves similar to those of a potato, not surprising since potatoes and tomatoes are closely related. My wife is probably right, but Brandywine or no, it will get the chance to make some kind of tomatoes, probably in my garden.

The reason she hectors me about overplanting is that she feels compelled to put up whatever tomatoes (or corn or green beans or broccoli, etc.) that I bring home from the garden.

(Now and then we run into city people who never heard the term “putting up.” It means freezing or canning or otherwise preserving food, usually vegetables.)

Between canning tomato sauce and homemade pickles, and freezing everything from green beans to zucchini, Brussel sprouts, lima beans, and sweet corn, and making our red raspberries and other fruits into tasty freezer jam, my poor wife spends much of her August chained to the kitchen and would like to do so less, thank you very much.

Last year I obediently, on Honey’s orders, put in only 40 tomato plants, but then one day I was lazy or stupid, mostly stupid, and watered them from a rain barrel into which I had dumped wood ashes, thinking that a little bit of potash from the wood ashes would help fertilize them, and it would have, if it had been a little bit. The quantity I dumped into the rain barrel was a recipe for making lye, and in a few days my tomato plants began to wilt and turn brown.

I reluctantly confessed my error and gratefully planted 40-some replacements from Honey’s greenhouse surplus. Then along came a good rain that leached out the caustic lye and all the injured tomatoes revived. That’s why I grew 84 tomato plants instead of 40 last summer.

This year we may end up similarly overburdened but this time with cabbages, because Honey couldn’t throw away old seed.

She gave me two partly used packets of Dutch Flat cabbage seed, one dated 2016, the other 2017. “Why don’t you sow them in the garden and see if any germinate?” she asked, which would be a perfectly logical thing to do if we were studying germination rates in 10-year-old seed, but in this case will result in growing dozens and dozens more cabbages than we need because if even a fourth of these old seeds germinate, I can’t just kill them. I’ll thin and transplant them, giving them a chance to be. If I were to just plow them under their little cabbagey ghosts would haunt me.

Dutch Flat are giant cabbages, but the seeds they grow from are like microscopic BBs, at the very margin of my being able to see or feel them. I sowed them by hand, I think I sowed them, in a very shallow row. Marcel Marceau plants his invisible garden.

Then there are the potatoes.

Last year I vowed I would dig potatoes as young as possible so that the family could enjoy that wonderful “new potato” flavor. The remainder of the crop I put in five-gallon buckets in the cool basement of the old farmhouse, and we ate on those through the winter. Some years I buy new seed potatoes, but this season I planted the leftover runts which were sprouting hopefully their buckets. I put in two rows very early, a month ago during those 80-degree days, along with beets, kale, onions, radishes, and sweet corn. (Don’t ya just love global warming?)

Saturday morning’s frost nipped the tender emerging potato vines, but they’ll come back, and if they don’t I have lots more to plant. My sprouting peas, onions, kale and beets are all cold-hardy. They laugh at the frosts of early May. And who cares about the radishes.

The joy of a big, productive garden is of course eating well and keeping the family in fresh produce (though they each have their own small gardens.) But there’s much joy in growing enough sweet corn, potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes to give away. Green beans, too, but they have to pick their own. We aren’t dopes.

“You don’t have to feed the whole county, dear,” my wife reminds me.

I nod and smile.