Gardens Don't Read Books

Every once in a while I read a book that changes my life. That happened to me a few years ago when I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Barbara Kingsolver’s a biologist by education and in her early career, but really, she was a writer, and has written bestselling novels of fiction and nonfiction with a strong component of environmental conservation and social justice.  Some of my friends say she’s too preachy, but I find her writing to be funny, human and inspiring.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about her and her family’s move from Arizona to her husband’s family farm in Southern Appalachia in Virgina, and their attempt to eat only food that was grown so locally that they actually knew the producers. In many cases, it was them as they grew vegetables and raised livestock.

I was completely captivated and wanted to do the same thing. We would eat like royalty all summer, then can and freeze and dry our huge bounty of vegetables! They would taste delicious instead of the bland and poisonous stuff shipped into the grocery store from around the world.

My husband read the book,too, and it wasn’t hard for me to talk him, a life long gardener, into digging and planting a huge garden, and plan to grow as much of our food as we possibly could.

So we did. And immediately discovered a few things.

• The lot had very little topsoil, and lots and lots of thick, heavy clay.
• You can’t work full time, bike, hike, go camping AND expect a weed-free, healthy garden during the summer.
• Everything ripens at once, and it happens when you’re busiest at work, just want to come home and relax, it’s about 95 degrees out.

Many things didn’t grow: the peas just couldn’t get started, the lima beans were missing in action, the onions were the same size when we harvested as when we planted. The urban deer herd ate all our lettuce, chard, and spinach, and nibbled the tops of everything else. Something took huge, messy, chomps out of each ear of sweet corn the night before we were going to pick it.

However. We persevered, and enjoyed a Technicolor harvest of zucchini, green beans, cucumbers, pumpkins, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, tomatoes—and more tomatoes. I took picture after picture and we ate like field hands.

I sweated through the late summer evenings and weekends, canning jars and jars of tomatoes, which were delicious. We froze everything else…and it all tasted…not as good as what’s available in the grocery store.

That winter was a time to regroup and rethink the purpose of the garden. Aside from the hard work, we loved planning it, looking at it, talking about it, harvesting from it—even the work, if it wasn’t too hot and buggy and we weren’t already exhausted.   I can’t explain how therapeutic it was to simply go out and work in. One beautifully sunny, cool day, when I couldn’t make up my mind which competing chore I should do—I thought, “what if this were the last day of my life? What would I pick?” That made it easy: work in the garden.

At the same time, I was pretty disillusioned with our ability and circumstances to grow our own food. The garden not only didn’t read the book, it had its own program, called “nature.” 

Since then, we’ve struck a compromise with the garden.  We won’t hold it completely responsible for feeding us, and in return it offers what it can. That means I have free therapy, and we have plenty of stories to tell; every year is different as to what foods we harvest. But what we mostly plant now are rows and rows of flowers: zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, bachelor buttons. Just because we like them, and we feel rich when we go outside and cut baskets full of them whenever—and if!—we want.