What do you do when the plants stop listening?

The cucumbers are quiet this week. Not wilting, not dying—just… still. Like they’ve stopped expecting me to show up. I water them anyway. It’s not about results anymore. It’s about the ritual of kneeling in the damp earth, hands in the soil, pretending the silence isn’t a kind of answer. I keep wondering: is it grief? Or just the slow erosion of hope? What do you do when care becomes its own kind of conversation, even if no one’s speaking back?