It’s only late June but already my vegetable garden is promising to be amazing. NOT.
Sigh.
One of the things I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that while I love me some fresh garden veggies – tender peas still in the pod, green beans that have never been frozen, carrots with dirt still on them – I’m not as enthusiastic about all that has to go into growing those things myself.
The trouble is this: vegetables, like babies, refuse to be independent. Gardens need to be weeded, watered, fertilized – and not by the neighbor’s cat. If it doesn’t rain regularly, my garden is in trou-ble. And I tend to wait until the weeds are large enough not to mistake them for fledgling zucchini plants that I sowed too late and too deep. But you never know. Hope spring eternal that old seeds will birth future zucchini cakes.
It’s not really the once-a-week kind of commitment that I tend to make it. My inner monologue goes something like this:
“Oh hey, Self, let’s go look at the garden.” This necessitates I don my flip flops and traipse out the backdoor as my raised boxes are hidden from easy window surveillance. The garden doesn’t make any noise, either, demanding constant inspection like the neighbors jackhammering their sidewalk. (What are they doing with that shed in the backyard, anyways?)
And then. “Oh, sh*t! Half the cucumbers plants died? And shrivelled into dental floss? What? How? Ohhhh, I suuuuuuckkk at this.” There is no sign of any zucchini plants performing a Lazarus. The beans are looking sketchy, despite the fact that I double-sowed them. And only half the sunflowers are on their way to not making it through the summer. Thankfully, every single tomato plant, of which I planted way too many are stretching to the sky and enjoying the hot southern side of the house. Maybe they like the privacy.
It’s not like I don’t know how this should go. I was birthed by a Gardener Extraordinaire. Mom’s gardens weren’t just the means for her to feed her family and teach us to love All The Green and Growing Things – they were also her canvas. She created fantastical flower beds full of all the old favorites – petunias, geraniums, delphiniums, sweet peas, snap dragons, bleeding hearts and tiger lilies (to name only a few). But Mom also did magical things with her vegetable gardens. One garden spot was never enough and, in each spot, you would find repeats of everything she planted in different configurations: rows parallel and perpendicular, bunches, square plots, volunteer dill everywhere and all of it hedged in with cotoneasters, lilac bushes and raspberry canes.
A visit to Mom’s house in the summer always ended in the garden, but sometimes began there, too, if she was prowling around it like a grown-up Mary Lennox in her Secret Garden when we arrived. She would be ready for a break and we’d go to the cool of the house for an instant coffee or better yet, her vegetable soup if we made it in time for lunch (which was 11:30 not noon.) Summer visits sometimes meant helping Mom with some weeding or picking 5-gallon-pails of beans or peas or ice-cream pails laced and tied to your waist with old nylons for a hands-free raspberry-picking experience. And bonus, you got to take your winnings home – you were doing her a favor.
When it was nearly time to go home, we’d go dig up some new potatoes, some onions, some carrots and wash them in the big tub under the outdoor tap and Mom would send us home with the pail of artfully arranged wet and gorgeous veggies. Supper was easy that night, which was a good thing because I would have a lot of shelling and blanching of peas and beans to do. Once, when touring my boys through, Mom pulled up an onion and Simon asked what it was. His Baba laughed and said, “It’s an onion. Do you want a bite?” And so, Simon did take a bite – it looked that good.
During Mom’s last summer, when she had moved to Vermilion, I was able to pop in on her quite often. Despite cancer, despite feeling crappy most of the time, in between the many naps she had to take each day – I would find her in the yard, watering the plants, picking some weeds, pulling up some carrots, cutting some flowers to take indoors. Her garden never flagged, not for one moment. She knew what it took.
I know what it takes, too, but I’m not there. Thankfully, there are people around me who still let me stroll through their canvases and inhale that mysteriously fragrant combination of dirt, rain and leaf that I grew up with. Sometimes they send me home with a zucchini or two. But I’m okay, I have my own tomatoes.
I don’t have to be a great gardener to appreciate the magic that takes place in garden plots every year or to remember the riches of my mother’s garden. And bonus: my husband says he needs a new hobby. Maybe he’ll take up gardening.
