In the Nursery

I thought we were done with the nursery.

No, not that kind of nursery. Until and unless there are grandchildren, Warren and I are both done on the baby front.

No, I mean the plant nursery. Ever since March 21, a large folding table has dominated the space in front on the patio door. To get to the back deck, you had to go through the percussion room, into the garage, then out to the patio and up to the deck.

All that was coming to an end this weekend. We spent part of Mother's Day tilling the two gardens. They and I were ready to go this weekend.

The table would finally, blessedly, be empty.

Yesterday I put in peppers, eggplants, and broccoli. We took some tomato plants out to dad. Today, I heeled in our tomatoes, planted onions, and seeded cilantro, basil, greasy beans, pumpkins, and zucchini.

In addition to being the weekend I planted the garden, this weekend is the Delaware Arts Festival, a two-day downtown street fair. The Symphony always has a booth there, which Warren and I helped set up early Saturday. I wanted to buy Ben and Alise's wedding present at the fair, so later on (before the first round of gardening), we spent a good hour or more wandering up and down the blocks looking at the wares.

One of the booths was a gourd artist, the kind who paint and carve gourds into decorative art - penguins, jolly Santas, dogs (no, Ben and Alise, I did not buy you gourd art). Warren is always interested in gourds - not to decorate our house with, but to turn into percussion instruments such as shakeres or güiros.

While he eyed the gourds, judging size and dimensions, I realized there were trays of brown paper packets underneath the lowest shelf.

Seed packets.

Gourd seed packets.

Warren and I engaged the proprietor in some gourd talk. What's this gourd here? How about this one?

Gourds have descriptive names: kettle, pear, apple, basketball. That's a big pear. That one? A penguin (painted like, you guessed it, a penguin).

I treated my husband: one pack of kettle seeds, one pack of large pear seeds. The seed owner and I talked planting and germination. He suggested starting them inside, under heat. They have a tough coating, so they'll take awhile to germinate. Just stay at it.

If I started now, I asked, would I still have enough growing season to get gourds this year?

Oh heavens, yes.

I spent all morning today gardening. The kitchen garden is fluffy and easy to work. The sod garden, even after last week's compost and roto-tilling, is still rough and still has a long ways to go. Pa Ingalls flashed across my mind.

The broccoli is down in the sod garden this year, where it can grow to the size of fifth graders if so desires. I have two rows of pie pumpkins and two rows of zucchini seeded. A fifth row will hold the gourds when their time comes. The kitchen garden will have eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, basil, cilantro, and pole beans this year. It is not as crowded as last year and this year I know where every single tomato is planted. I also planted six containers: two with artichokes (trying yet once again) and four with sugar lump cherry tomatoes.

By the time I finished, I was tired. But not too tired to make ten newspaper seed pots, fill them with wet potting soil, and poke a gourd seed down into each one. The big table came down as planned, but one of the small deck tables holds a tray of seeds and a lamp just fine. The babes-in-waiting spent a hour or two in the sun before I carried them inside and tucked them in for a nap.

The nursery is humming one last time this garden season.

Up and At ‘Em in the Garden

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.