Vegetable Predator

I’ve never really gardened. Oh, there was my second husband’s garden in the suburbs, over 25 years ago…but that was HIS garden. Then there was the cherry tomato jungle/mesclun mix surprise in a 3x5 box garden in the inner city – just before the bassett hound knocked it all over and wallowed in it – but that was almost 20 years ago and I still don’t know how that happened.

I started gardening because I love to read essays. Thurber, E.B. White, and most recently Barbara Kingsolver. Barbara writes some of the best essays I’ve ever read. High Tide in Tucson hooked me, and then when I saw Animal, Vegetable, Miracle on the shelf at Powell’s I knew that I would break my rule of always taking the book out of the library first before giving up another two inches of precious bookshelf space.

Well, Barbara, you win the sustainable living contest, you are from farming people and have acres of land there in the verdant Southeast, but I didn’t do too badly. I had no idea of what to do. Like any good liberal, I threw money at the problem. We cut down the 20 foot laurel hedge – any fool could see that it shaded everything and took up literally 200 square feet of potential growing space. Even I know that sun is important. We cut down the dying wormy filbert tree and the drooping cedars that were once ornamental and now were turning red and falling down. Suddenly our little backyard looked…bigger. Intimidating. “So what are you going to do with me now?” There was a little silly lawn, the worse for wear after years of being the default bathroom for the dog who lived here before us. I covered it with newspapers last fall – Barbara told me to do it, in her book – so by this spring the grass would be dead and we’d have more space for boxes.

I got a late start this spring, what with losing my job and blowing up the house (not really, but the pot left on the stove made us move out for five weeks), but still managed to talk my husband into building five raised-bed boxes and my 16-year-old son into loading a few cubic yards of good soil into them. I put down black cloth between, supposed to keep the weeds down (hah!) and covered that with pea gravel, which I had loaded a bag at a time into my tiny 1995 Geo Metro and unloaded a bag at a time into the back yard. No wheelbarrow, not yet, and the men in my family had taken to leaving the house when they saw me look at the back yard, so this was my back that got to carry these 80-pound bags.

The Seeds of Change catalog and I had had a flirtation earlier in the spring. I ordered a lot of heirloom stuff that looked interesting and prolific because 1) I believe that heirlooms are less likely to attract pests and disease, 2) they aren’t anything I can buy in the store or they cost dearly at the farmer’s market and 3) if I’m going through all this, I want a LOT of stuff. The tomatoes went into the ground in May, so did the carrots, green beans and zucchini, chard and lettuce and arugula, onions and leeks and winter squash.

All I knew about carrots was to keep them moist for the first two weeks. Okay, I watered them. Then I noticed that they were sprouting in clumps, so I carefully took out every second sprout and planted it somewhere else. I planted six zucchini plants. That was noisy, because my husband kept howling for me to stop. Not having really planted a garden before, I felt like making the sign of the cross and humming “Abide With Me” as I buried each seed in the dirt. Little did I know!

Three months later, having pulled out five of the zucchini plants along the way, I’m out in the garden harvesting. What a word. Harvesting. Growing up in America, where we have all kinds of nostalgia about the lost family farm of two or three generations ago but not much first-hand knowledge of actual vegetable predation, I have put pumpkins on my porch, celebrated Thanksgiving with autumn-colored linens meant to represent fall leaves, and eaten fall produce (alongside hydroponic tomatoes and asparagus from some spring garden in some other hemisphere). But I’ve never actually harvested anything. At least, not like this.

At first, I thought of the garden as just a nice produce section conveniently located in my back yard. A couple carrots here, a few green beans there, enough tomatoes for the evening’s caprese salad. It was working out just fine for me. I made fewer trips to the market. My family was impressed with the nice little additions to our salads and soups.

But these are not nice polite vegetables anymore. They don’t wait their turn. At first, the green beans hid under the leaves, cleverly disguised as vines until it was time to turn woody and revoltingly khaki colored. I had to outwit them. Maybe hunters feel this way hiding behind a duck blind, waiting for the prey to break cover. Ya gotta peek behind their dressing curtains and surprise them. Not anymore. The green beans have shouldered their way out into the open now. Maybe they figure that there are so many of them, a few of them have to die to give the rest of them living space and it doesn’t matter if a few sacrifice themselves for the others, but I can just grab a handful of beans all at once, yank and drop them into the already full paper bag at my feet. The tomatoes are still hiding, but brush aside a vine or two or some leaves and there sits another pint of tomatoes looking embarrassed.

So instead of the nice morning I had planned, getting stew in the crockpot, studying a script, ironing a shirt or two and oh yes, taking a shower, I have been standing in my dirt-smudged pajamas trimming and blanching beans, shredding zucchini, pulling squash, chopping, roasting and pureeing tomatoes…since I never really believed in germination, I didn’t plan on preserving any harvest. Where does it say that you are supposed to do something with pounds and bags of produce in the fall, just when you’re getting busy with other things?

I will say, it’s made me really careful with food. I used to be a food age-er. You know, where you put the food in the refrigerator and let it get to that certain age before you throw it out. Now it hurts to throw out anything, especially when I remember loading the dirt and watering earlier in the morning than I really wanted to and bending over to weed and transplant and what the HELL is this disgusting thing growing on my chard?

And even though I’m grudgingly pleased with myself for having just spent three hours moving produce out of the backyard and into usable form in my freezer (isn’t this what Trader Joe’s used to be for?) I am not completely dim – I know that this is like laundry and I’ll be doing the same thing day after tomorrow.

Just as soon as I finish my list of notes for next year. Where should I put my five raspberry plants? When do potatoes need to get in the ground? What about cilantro? Oh, can you grow garlic? I should be planting it NOW? And when does the next Seeds of Change catalog come out? There are just a few more things I want to grow in the garden.