My grandparents, my dad’s parents, always grew a vegetable garden. Always. There were just the two of them, but they planted enough corn, tomatoes, bell peppers (mysteriously called “mangoes” in the family), onions, and other vegetables to stock a small grocery. Some of the produce went to family members who were the grasshoppers to my grandparents’ ants or who had moved “into town” (in this case a village) and no longer had space for a garden. Some of it showed up fresh on the Sunday dinner table all summer long. Quite a bit of it got canned or frozen by my grandmother for future use. (When she died, my parents spent an afternoon tossing out ancient canned goods that she had “put up” sometime in the last decade.)
My grandparents gardened because they had both grown up in the “hollers” of eastern Kentucky without much money or resources other than family ingenuity and hard work. Putting food on the table was a year round effort and one that they never slacked off at as adults, even after the children grew up and even after their finances allowed them to go a little easy. Young newlyweds during the Depression, they never forgot the lesson of “not enough”—be it dollars or beans—and every year for as long as they were able, they planted to ward off that specter.
This year I am following in my grandparents’ footsteps for lots of reasons, including a love of cooking and a desire to cut food costs. While I was writing this post, 74 homemade seed pots were sitting on the back deck. I am sunning them outside every chance the weather warms up to give them a break from the platoon of lamps that I have kept them under for the last two weeks. The broccoli sprouted first; the tomatoes are popping up daily, sometimes hourly. Seed by seed, sprout by sprout, my garden is coming to life.
I picked the vegetables as much for their names as their qualities. With names like “Sweet Chocolate” and “King of the North,” how can I not be enchanted with the possibilities in the pepper patch? The weeds are still a distant haze on the horizon.
It turns out that I am a worrier when it comes to gardening. I worry that I waited too long to start the seeds, that I don’t have the soil warm enough for them to germinate (although the tomatoes are quelling that worry), that the seed pots will disintegrate before transplanting time (they’re only newspaper), or that when the time comes to put them in the ground, I will run out of room in the beds (which have still to be prepared) because the seed pots only cover the vegetables that need an indoor start and not the additional ones that can be planted directly outside (another twelve different vegetables, including pie pumpkins).
When I have worried myself into a knot, I remind myself of my grandparents’ garden. I am quite sure my grandmother, as no nonsense a woman as ever walked the earth, never fussed over seedlings or carried them in and out of the house to sun them. She knew what I am learning: the seeds will sprout, watched or not. I can hear her urging me back to my other tasks: There’ll be work enough in the garden without all of this nonsense! They’re plants! They’ll grow!
In the end, if Grandma is right, I will spend the summer feeding my family and friends out of this garden. Like her, I will can and freeze the surplus for the winter to come. For now, though, I have to be content with scanning the pots daily for the first shoot, the first slim green thread rising up out of the potting soil.
Seed by seed, sprout by sprout. And an occasional sunbath on the back deck.
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