Early in the spring I, like millions of others am seduced virtually, on paper and in my best imagination. I succumb like a weakling to a virus, to the false sense of farmer that lurks in all of us who live in anything greater than a city apartment on the 10th floor. First the seed catalogues arrive, glossy and charming with their carefully groomed pages fairly smelling of fertility, then you start to see packets of seeds everywhere, the hardware store, the drug store, even the grocery store. Milk, bread and prizewinning zinnias. Next it’s in all the layouts in the spring magazines featuring the perfectly groomed well planned photo ready gardens of perfection. There’s no end to the pressure, you must grow something, you live in the country. You are un-American if you are not trying to feed yourself and your family from that which you have personally dug, sown, fertilized, weeded and harvested.
It is this unrelenting sense of urgency which drives me every year, ever hopeful, yet ever brown thumbed into the shops to spend massive amounts of money on plants and seeds, fencing and stakes, cages and wires and labeling sticks and clay nursing pots. Burlap and weed mat, fountain heads and hoses, buckets and trowels and little forks, big spades and specialty spades for digging things I may not even have planted, but all that shiny stainless steel speaks to me and beckons me. Buy me and the peas will not fail. Purchase this, it is the best, and guarantees a bumper crop. There are items in the garage about which I have no knowledge, tools that defy description of purpose, but have forced me to bring them home in the ever hopeful anticipation that I will grow food for us this year.
This has gone on at various levels of insanity since 1989, so one can only begin to imagine the untold fortune that has been spent to date. Eagerly, annually I put on my Eddie Bauer hat and don my LL Bean boots, only the best for me. And I march into the garden, enthused and encumbered with hope. I dig and plant and photograph, I post pictures on facebook of the early seedlings as they pop their sprouty little heads up out of the rich, expensively augmented soil. I am all pride and wishful thinking at this point. This year under the spell of some confounding, deranged sense of self delusion, I said yes to being on the garden tour and all H E double hockey sticks broke loose. I didn’t even admit to the hubs that this was going down until one Saturday three weeks before the dreaded day, he happened to notice and comment on how great things were looking. Noting that I had really stuck with it this year, had really kept up with the weeds and such, well I admitted finally, we are on the garden tour. I mumbled rather than spoke these words articulately then ran off ostensibly too busy to continue our chat. He tracked me down to the laundry room whereupon he gazed down at me in complete and utter disbelief. Have you lost your mind he asked, strangers will come here and look at all our stuff. All our weeds and all the bits of the house that need painting, they’ll notice the shingles missing over the breakfast room, they’ll see where I didn’t finish painting the other two garage trim pieces. No, you’re looking at it all wrong said I, they will only see the pretty things, they’ll see the flowers and all the shrubs that are in bloom this time of year. Besides I am going to serve drinks so everyone will be happy, and they won’t have the nerve to criticize.
The garden tour came and went and to be honest, that is another story in itself. The garden was spectacular on that particular weekend. The hubs came through, my horticultural knight on shining John Deere, all was mowed and trimmed and painted anew. But my garden, harbinger of failure’s future, still had weeks to go before any broken promise of harvest was to manifest. After the tour of course, I stopped weeding in earnest. I no longer really minded all those cute vines that were rambling out of control over most of what might turn out to be produce. I could no longer see a lot of what was growing by a month later and now in August, it is time to reap the rewards of my mediocre, lack luster maintenance. I shall recount for you the entirety of this year’s harvest. About nine strawberries, and they were good, two beets which I forgot to cook and thus, they rotted in the fridge. There are some onions and what I think is garlic still to pull. I have eaten one serving of green beans and possibly two of peas. I was astonished to discover that lettuce, if left to its own devices will grow to about four feet high before it topples under the weight of my neglect. But let me tell you about my potatoes. There are eleven of them. They were grown in sacks, the latest rage amongst we veggie types, they are red and gold and I will milk the joys of these spuds for days. I intend to photograph them, bake them, fry them and make a salad out of a couple. I will take some to work so that I can talk about them, and I will even offer a couple to my sister in law’s kids who will say just the right thing: Oh I wish our mom would grow vegetables like you do, auntie Anne! Yes, those eleven perfect potatoes are my redemption, for lies of omission to my husband, for ideological self agrandizement, they will be my gardener’s glory. Ooh look the fall bulb catalogue just came in the mail, I can’t wait.
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