Spring. March, being my least favorite month of the year, brings with it one bright spot. While the northeast snowstorms and first rays of late sunshine battle it out, I am scouring my favorite seed catalog. I’m pulling out last year’s seeds, counting the folded and battered envelopes containing any overflow from the previous season. What do I need? What do I want? What new things can I try?
This year's new undertaking: Pac Choi.
I’m not a particularly sharp housekeeper. Houseplants weep when they pass over the threshold of my door. I’ll let quite a few dog poop piles accumulate before I head out with a shovel (you don’t even want to know what I mean when I say “quite a few”). So why the motivation for a vegetable garden? It takes a lot of work, and a lot of money. I figure my homegrown organic veggies are running me roughly, say, $20 a pound? Several reasons:
Tradition. The desire for a little plot of vegetables runs in my blood, like my rage, appetite for ice cream, and oversized feet. In my earliest memories, spring is synonymous with the sound of the rototiller firing up. My parents kept a garden the size of an Olympic swimming pool in our backyard. I can still see my dad working the rows, wearing tall sweat socks, scant 70s era shorts, and a savage tan instead of a shirt. My grandmother still keeps her garden today; and a Christmas cactus that descended from one of my great-grandfather’s fabled plants sits in my kitchen. Last summer I came full circle, scolding L. for picking things that weren’t yet ripe; a lecture I’ve heard many times myself.
L. 'helping' in last year's garden.
The magic. The first green sprouts of a new plant never fail to impress. I set up my little plastic trays in the kitchen, filling them with soil and pressing tiny, dry, hard seeds into them. Some will sprout in what feels like minutes (broccoli) and others will take weeks before giving you any satisfaction (parsley). As soon as their little heads curl out of the dirt, they race up and out, reaching for the sun. It makes me smile to hear L. yell, “I’m going to check and see if my plants are growing!” The joke is on me however, when I stroll by 30 minutes later and realize, wow; I think they have grown while I was out of the room.
The lessons. The garden has a lot to teach you. There’s nothing scary about a garter snake. You can’t just put everything in the ground on the same day and expect it to grow. Weeds are a bitch. You don’t really need 25 snap pea plants (unless you want somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 snap peas). You’re better at growing zucchini than red peppers, but then again, everyone is. If you leave the garden to rot over the winter, it will still be there in the spring, but grosser. To be fair, that was the summer I discovered I was pregnant and became oddly repelled by fresh food. The little I could bear to pick without vomiting went to neighbors and I turned my back on the rest in favor of plain cake doughnuts and McDonald’s fries.
The satisfaction. Successfully coaxing vegetables out of the ground brings one a certain smug air. Grilling tonight? No problem, let me just grab some fresh summer squash out of the garden to throw on. That tomato sauce? Oh, thanks, it’s just a little something I whipped up with my own tomatoes, onions, peppers, basil, and oregano. No biggie. Aside from the self-righteousness, it’s also satisfying in that it is hard work. I’m not exactly a paragon of physical fitness. But in my garden I’m strong enough to move landscaping timbers and push a wheelbarrow full of loam. I’m strong enough to shovel two yards (a lot) of wood chips around the raised beds my husband made me. I can squat a million times to plant seeds, pull weeds, and bait those retched effing slugs.
Impatiently digging snow out of the raised beds.
The acceptance. In a culture that values image, money, and looks over pretty much all else, my garden values only my time. It doesn’t care that I’m wearing homemade jean shorts and rain boots. I don’t have to suck it in, or comb my hair, or even wear clean clothes to work in the garden. It’s quiet, it’s mine, and it’s available any time of day. A well-tended garden will benefit from hours of work nearly every day. Happily, if it’s raining and shining with some regularity, the same garden is just fine if I disappear for a week at a stretch.
A time-keeper. Summer slips by quickly in a region that can really only count about 10 weeks of real heat in a year. The garden makes me get outside and give thanks for the summer days; it makes me pay attention. It makes me grateful to hear rain on the roof at night. It stretches the season, bringing me out to prepare the ground in the spring and keeping me there through the first frost. After Christmas, when the winter really begins, I have a short time to wait for the new Johnny’s Select Seeds catalog to arrive.
Last year's garden planning, saved so I can remember what's what.
Pictures of our house mark the years we’ve been here. The front garden as it was the first year, with some remaining perennials and a shockingly ugly assortment of annuals I got at Home Depot. The year we built the first vegetable bed. The year we put a fence around the flower garden. My favorite picture is the one we recently found on Google Earth that shows our new, big vegetable garden. I like this, because I can brag that you can see my garden from space.
In Maine, the spring comes slowly. Our yard is a particularly cold spot in the New England circle of hell, and my front flower garden remains heaped with snow long after the rest of the town has been uncovered. Like most people here, the first warm weekend days chase us out into the yard, and we start picking away at a winter’s worth of debris. Bit by bit, experimentally. Sure, I’ll rake around the swing set while L. swings. Pick a handful of leaves out of a flowerbed.
Recreation break.
Before I know it, I’m frantically tending to dozens of seedlings, moving them from plastic tray to bigger plastic tray. Get them under the lights! Water them! Argh! Seedlings are not nearly so laid back as the planted garden, it turns out. The first crocus blooms, our signal to really dig in and uncover the flower garden. The crocuses may come into the garden when it’s still a brown mess, but no other plant is greeted with such fanfare by the house. And here we are, greeting another summer. Let it begin!
Our first crocus flowers, from bulbs we planted right after L.'s birth.
