Non-gardener has change of heart
(Originally published August 2022)
Summer’s not over yet, but I’ve conducted a preliminary assessment of my 2022 No-Garden Plan, and here are my findings: I’m an idiot.
A couple of months ago I announced, right on this page, that I was going to skip the vegetable garden this year. I’d use the time to take up a new hobby like, I don’t know, dusting.
I’ve always stunk at gardening. I drive by other people’s houses and marvel at the neatly fenced plots in their side yards. Their rows are tidy. Their squash vines aren’t choking out their tomatoes. Their water hoses are coiled just so.
By midsummer, my gardens look like the aftermath of a bitter battle between man and nature in which nature has prevailed.
“With soil flying, I planted late summer veggies like broccoli, kale, lettuce, and snap peas. ”
I looked forward to a summer that wasn’t all about dirt—putting things in it, pulling things out of it, getting it wet, scraping it out from under my nails. But in these weeks without a garden, I discovered something: I miss dirt.
And dirt is only part of it. When I said I didn’t want to grow any vegetables this year, I failed to anticipate the upshot: namely, I don’t have any vegetables. It’s almost as if the expression “You reap what you sow” can be interpreted literally. And now I’m stuck eating produce, grown by strangers, that I have to pay for.
Every time I bite into a juicy, locally grown cherry tomato, I hear a cash register “cha-ching” sound and taste umami tinged with notes of self-recrimination. In the past, instead of appreciating the bounty of a garden I invariably overplanted and then neglected, I whined about having too much free produce on my hands.
Why, oh why, didn’t I plant a garden this year?
I know why. I thought it would free up all sorts of time. Somehow, I forgot my default setting: too busy. I live by a self-imposed to-do list, and no matter how many or how few items are on it, they expand to take up 20 percent more time than I have available.
Even without a garden, on the summer solstice this year I jumped out of bed in a fighting stance, crying, “Only 15 hours and 36 minutes of daylight? Why, that’s not enough to get everything done!”
But summer isn’t over yet. So last weekend, I decided to plant vegetables after all. I couldn’t reclaim the large main beds, which have basically reverted to pasture. (Let’s say they are “lying fallow,” with a cover crop of Queen Anne’s lace and thistle.)
That didn’t stop me, however, from attacking my raised beds. I dug out burdocks, dandelions, and grass by the fistful and tilled in some decadent-looking soil from under the old manure pile. Ah, sweet, sweet dirt.
With soil flying, I planted late summer veggies like broccoli, kale, lettuce, and snap peas. I contemplated putting in tomatoes but didn’t, concluding that growing conditions here will, alas, likely be less than Mediterranean by Halloween.
Sunday afternoon, I was writhing around on the lawn with the garden hose, cursing the Boy Scout who had snuck onto our property and used it for clove hitch practice, when I heard a loud and, some would say, triumphant laugh. It was my neighbor.
“I thought you said you weren’t putting in a garden this year,” she said with a grin.
Extricating my left leg from an expertly rendered double overhand knot, I told her that although I had made a public declaration to that effect, I hadn’t signed a binding contract.
But I did concede that I had made a mistake and was going to do my best to rectify it in what remained of the growing season.
“I knew you’d cave,” she said. (She did not actually say this. I merely inferred it from the way she chuckled and shook her head as she returned to her yard.)
After many hours of work, I limped back to the house, leaving my customary trail of gardening implements behind me. I was tired and sweaty, with blisters on my palms and dirt under my nails.
It felt fantastic.
I may not be good at gardening, but I’m overjoyed to get back into it. Dusting, it turns out, is not my thing.
