How Does a Garden Grow?

I've tried gardens a couple of times in the past, and while I love getting my hands in the dirt, I hate weeding and mosquitos and the surplus of a single type of produce that comes with these pesky old seasons.

My first garden attempt was with Amy and Dave in the backyard at Bob-O-Link. They tilled the soil and blistered their hands, and then I spent hours in the dirt putting seeds and seedlings six inches apart and two inches deep (or at least what felt like six inches apart and two inches deep). We planted carrots and strawberries and tomatoes and green peppers and red peppers, and for the first couple of weeks, I weeded and overlooked the dirt patch with nothing but optimism. At about the one month mark, the mosquitos were so bad you couldn't pick a tomato without donating a pint of blood. Weeding became a thing of the past, and the garden was left to its own devices for days at a time.

Even without our TLC, we were still gifted with the fruits of our labor every time we trekked to the garden. Red peppers, which were just as easy to grow as green peppers but which cost three times as much at the grocery store, started showing up, carrot tops started breaking through the earth. The garden was growing.

When life gives you peppers, well, you have to use them. With the same optimism I'd had when we planted the seedling, I started chopping the green peppers for veggie lasagna. Accustomed to store bought produce, I assumed that when I popped the garden pepper in my mouth it would be the same experience I'd had whenever I'd popped a purchased pepper in my mouth.
Not the case.

Garden grown produce actually has taste. It's full of flavor, dense with aroma and completely screws up your cooking. Where I'd normally used three peppers, I could only use one, and that one little pepper was almost overpowering. And then on top of that, I had a basket of peppers. No one likes veggie lasagna that much.

The carrots were a different story. They were tiny, little finger-sized carrots. I assumed they were ready to harvest because it was a beautiful weekend day and I felt like being in the dirt. I pulled up one and saw a rod of orange, and immediately plunked myself in carrot row and started digging up buried treasure.

Then, as it does in Kentucky, the weather turned. The thunder rolled in, the rain bore down, and the lightning did its best to find me hunched over immature carrots, drenched to the bone and relishing in gardening without mosquitos. After one too many brushes with death, David finally came outside to point out how absurd I was being and ordered me to abandon the carrots and come inside.

I don't really like carrots, so I don't remember eating them or how they tasted. For me, the thrill came from cultivating them.

The second garden came courtesy of Shannon, who read somewhere that success was growing a garden, and since she is a brilliant overachiever, it only followed suit that she would grow a garden. She started her seeds under grow lamps in the kitchen. For weeks we watched as dirt pods gave way to unfolding seeds. For weeks I wondered if the police would be raiding us anytime soon.

When it came time to break the earth, what better spot that right in the middle of the backyard? After she'd shoveled a path to having a garden, she stacked the old land in a heap next to her project and was content to let that mound be the start to the Picadome Hills. Having done the garden thing, I made it clear that this was her project. I watched, I laughed, I shook my head, knowing that if the weeds didn't kill her the mosquitos would. I also assumed my usual position as her shadow and cleaned up her destruction so that the beauty she was making would be amplified.

I don't know how often we pulled goodies out of that garden. She planted peppers, tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, chives and zinnias, and I distinctly remember the thrill of adding some of its offerings to breakfast one day. Shannon married Charles that summer, so the garden didn't get its due respect from anyone. I mowed around it every week, noting how many tomatoes were abandoned to rot on the ground, how many zinnias were begging to have a place on the island in the kitchen. Life just got in the way of the romance of having a garden. Life and the mosquitos.

My association with two gardens has left me with a brutal honesty about what I will do for a vegetable. I will not hoe, I will not till, I will not weed, I will not fertilize, I will not harvest regularly, I will not modify my cooking.

I also will not miss the chance to bite into a juicy, warm, homegrown tomato in the middle of summer, and since I'm not sure I can count on Californians to share their produce the way Kentuckians do, I'm back on the garden wagon. I love how tomatoes are hot inside when you pull them from the vine. I love slicing them and putting salt on them and calling it a meal. I love making salsa from their mass production. They're the the flavor of my childhood, of summers at Grandma's and cookouts by the sandbox. They trump watermelon and ice cream, the swimming pool and playing Chase at dusk. They're the heart of the garden, and even when the gardener doesn't have heart, the tomatoes still deliver.

Just 60 more days...