On Gardening, 2009

I originally wrote this on January 25th of 2009 and posted it on my Facebook page. It's relevant to what I am trying to accomplish now so I wanted to include it here.
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I married my husband in the spring of 2001. Within a month of putting on the old ball and chain, we moved from Tucson, Arizona to Coulee Dam, Washington for his new job. As we drove northward with a U-Haul packed to the brim and pulling my Subaru, the weather changed from the upper 80s characteristic of late spring in Tucson to cold and snowing in the passes of Montana. When we finally stopped at our new home and unloaded our truck full of the wedding presents that we’d hardly had time to unwrap, we found ourselves in the midst of early spring.

A time to think about growing a garden.

Once we had unpacked boxes, put away dishes, and gotten settled into our new jobs, our attention turned to the small garden area between our carport and patio. We started a compost pile, bought some cow manure, pulled shovels out of our shed, and got to work work, stopping only when our efforts disinterred what looked to be a wet and partially mummified Guinea pig in a plastic baby wipes box. A sight disturbing to behold - the waste of a good faunal specimen.

With our garden plot sufficiently fertilized, we purchased plants; a generic set of tomatoes, some lettuce, and herbs. All of which did well that summer - early frost damage aside. It wasn’t the greatest garden, but I had been bitten by the bug.

Shortly into that first long, dark winter, I started to plan our efforts for the following year. A friend at work introduced me to the concept of starting plants from seed, and gave me a spare Territorial Seeds catalog.

My mind was blown.

When I was younger, my mother purchased heirloom tomato seeds from a distinctly hippie-looking mimeographed four-page catalog that she got in the mail. She always seemed excited about the crazy varieties of tomatoes, herbs, and Jerusalem artichokes she grew next to my strawberry patch.

I didn’t like eating tomatoes all that much back then. And that dislike was mild compared to how I felt about picking tomatoes and weeding the plants in the humid Texas high summer with wasps all around and the smell of tomatoes seeming to make its way into my very pores. And I won’t even discuss the unspeakable flavor of Jerusalem artichokes - a tuber my mom was in raptures over due to its immense productivity and potential for sustaining us in the event of the complete collapse of the world system (an eventuality that I didn’t give much heed back then and that I would've rather succumbed to than weathered with Jerusalem artichokes).

All those issues aside, I was, like many other girls, pretty much immune to finding anything my mom deemed exciting worthy of more than a passing glance.

If mom was that excited, it was clearly lame.

But, with the wisdom of someone in the early stages of adulthood, I realized that as a pre-teen I had been completely, utterly wrong. Thanks to the amazing variety of heirloom vegetables available to be grown from seeds, it turned out that I could have a complete alterna-garden. I decided that, from then on, all the vegetables I grew were going to be unexpected colors. My beans would be purple, my cucumbers lemon yellow, my carrots maroon, and my tomatoes black, white, and peach. I would grow blue potatoes, chocolate brown peppers, and pumpkins that were white.

I ordered seeds, bought one grow light (and then another), got organic seaweed fertilizer to spray on leaves, and saved yogurt containers to hold my transplanted seedlings. I prepared the garden by placing a soaker hose under black mesh to keep the soil warm, moist, and weed-free without overwatering the leaves. I got a small greenhouse shelf so that my plants could harden outside in preparation for planting, and bought a fleet of large pots to hold the garden that had quickly outgrown the plot that came with the house.

That year, I had an amazing garden. And, as every gardener would probably tell you, I reaped all the rewards of spending time outdoors digging in the dirt. I bent and stretched, and picked up heavy things, and moved dirt around while soaking up a responsible amount of Vitamin D. It was fun. And it was rewarding to eat my very own tomatoes, dig up potatoes to eat, and have my own white pumpkin to carve at Halloween.

I had big plans for the following year. Plans that didn’t come quite to fruition because, while pregnant with my daughter, I had less energy to get seeds started and spend time bending over in the sun. Most of the veggies we did start didn’t ripen until I was almost due, and were left unpicked after we brought our daughter home from the hospital.

"Next year," I told myself.

But the next year came and went, without any free time in which to start seeds or plant a garden. Some volunteers grew from the seeds of unharvested tomatoes and bolted lettuce. But these were largely ignored for lack of free time and sanity.

I said it again: "Next year."

Before the next year even had a chance to get started, we moved to Death Valley. And all the seeds I had purchased two years before sat, untouched, in our blazing hot garage for three summers until we moved once again. This time to the DC area.

After unpacking our boxes for the third time since our marriage, I found myself looking in the box that held my long-neglected seeds. I couldn’t imagine that anything could have survived the immense heat of three Death Valley summers stuffed in a garage. It would regularly get to be 120 degrees outside and, in the absence of air conditioning, everything that we stored in the garage seemed to shrivel and brown in a way that reflected how I felt during those long, hot seasons.

I planted the seeds anyway. Primarily to be rid of them in advance of buying more, but also as an experiment of sorts. Was it even remotely possible that the seeds had survived with their potential intact? Where I once would have dropped only a few seeds on a peat pellet to germinate, I dumped on eight or ten. I put them on plastic plates under a crappy florescent light on a kitchen counter and watered them when I thought to.

To my immense surprise, they sprouted. Well, not all of them. Every single purple bush bean seed sprouted into a healthy plant, but not a single purple pole bean made an appearance.

White and peach tomato plants were abundant beyond belief - after sprouting so many seeds I found that I didn’t have the heart to thin them to harshly, and ended up expanding my tomato patch into the yard and up the sides of the fence. But none of the Black Russian tomatoes came up.

Armenian cucumbers, check. Lemon cucumbers, not a one.

Only a single marigold seed sprouted from a full packet, but it produced an abundance of flowers.

Basil, yes. Red eggplants, no.

I could see no rhyme or reason to what survived. But for me, the miracle was that anything survived at all, let alone flourished.

As our garden grew and blossomed, it became a place that I could play with the kids, sit while they spent endless hours spraying each other with the hose, or talk with new and old friends in the evening while watching the fireflies blink. I realized that I was blossoming in our new environment as well. Like some of my seeds, I had survived seasons in the heat, and was ready to move on to the next stage.

This winter, I have been thinking of my plans for our next garden. Today, I took my daughter downstairs and set up the grow lamps that I have not used since she was born. We took out packets of seeds, and talked about what we could start early to set out when it warms up in a month or two, and what we will wait to start until after all the frosts have passed. Tonight we will plant seeds together. Mostly pansies, and some cold-tolerant veggies. And I realize that she will find the kohlrabi and cabbages just as lame as I found my mom’s crazy tomatoes and horrific Jerusalem artichokes. But I hope that she will come to enjoy the experience of watching a plant grow from a seed, and learn that even after times have been harsh, there is still a chance that something wonderful will grow.