A reminder from the Garden Goddess helps me find joy among all my gardening fiascoes

Although autumn doesn't begin until Wednesday, I've already started my end-of-season ritual, which I call taking down the gardens. I cut down all the bloomed-out perennials, do some weeding as I move on my knees through the beds, and note the spots where there's room for more plants. Normally I enjoy the tradition that marks the changing seasons. But this September, even as I glory in the newly red, yellow and bronze leaves on our maple tree, I'm feeling tinged with blue. None of my gardens – the flower beds or, especially, the vegetable patches – reached their typical standards this summer. Faithful readers might be wincing in sympathy, because they know my vegetable growing skills are pathetic at best. Acknowledging a drop-off this season takes us into negative numbers. For an impetuous gardener like me, whose heaviest yield of beans, for example, was barely two cups in 2014, it's time for a therapy session with the Garden-Goddess.

During this spring and summer of drought and smoke, I picked enough toothpick-skinny stalks to make one side dish. Total. The rest of the stalks seemed to go seed nearly as fast as they emerged. Asparagus roots are shallow and shouldn't be disturbed by annual fall rototilling, so my husband covered them with a generous blanket of compost last fall. But we had no asparagus soup, fettuccine tossed with steamed stalks, or roasted asparagus with sun-dried tomatoes. We also composted and rototilled a raised bed before I planted sugar snap peas – usually my old reliables, happily climbing their netting and yielding fat pods of sweet, raw peas. This year the quail helped thin the seed rows, and the plants that survived apparently feared for their lives every day. Few of them showed the moxie to thrive.

The bean plants bagged out early, although, compared to the rest of the veggie slackers, they're this year's champs. By combining this summer's harvests of the dried cannellini and red-speckled Italian beans, I'll be able to make one pot of minestrone soup, an autumn treat with homemade bread. The broccoli bed, for which I had high hopes when I planted the little seedlings in June, never recovered from an early onslaught by the neighborhood bunny. Those plants faced a further handicap, as did the tomatoes, when I allowed volunteer sunflowers to grow to full height in their beds. The tomatoes tough enough to grow and ripen also developed skins tough enough to use for belt-making. Of course, the three indefatigable zucchini plants cranked out their squash all summer long, no matter how little care I gave them. Many thanks to readers who took pity on me and sent recipes starring the fabulous Zs, encouraged me to donate my surplus to local food banks (which I did,) and made me laugh with their own tales of green overload.

Our perennial flower beds blazed with color and texture from early spring until mid-July, when the drought and intense heat wilted most of them. Although we used drip systems in the raised beds and the backyard gardens, and I hand-watered the perennials, our water bills for June and July were stunning. Finally, the optimistic gardener within me wilted, too, and I stopped all but the most life-sustaining watering.

Lately I have heard a soft message from the Garden Goddess: Find joy in what is. Look forward to what can be. So I've been feeling thankful for the flocks of finches that perch on this summer's unexpected gift of seed-bearing sunflowers outside my window. The little birds, yellow, gray and white, dangle upside down from the flower heads, selecting their seeds, cheeping happily and calling out to their pals to join them for lunch. I find joy and gratitude every time I stop to watch Rags, our frail Old English sheepdog, slowly make his way down the patio steps and raise his head toward the sun and the breeze. And I'm happy – bemused, but happy – that my chief garden staffer, Tessa the Vague, has found my lap after 14 years and uses it as a safe place for being petted and praised. One day soon, I'm sure, she will remember where the garden is and join me in welcoming a new season. (Benjamin BadKitten, her deposed predecessor, offered to draw her a neighborhood map. The map used his own muddy paw prints to bypass the garden entirely and point the most direct way to the nearby house where two big dogs live. My BadKitten still seems to have a few issues with the staff changeover.)