The Garden

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but my daughter got the bright idea that she wanted to grow a vegetable garden this year.

Now, she comes from a long line of green thumb types.

My dad grows tomatoes every year and kept apple and pear trees for years. His dad was an avid grower of things as well and even had a tree that grew plums and apricots at the same time, I kid you not. My mom still keeps flower beds in both the front and back yards and spends hours at a time attacking any weed that dares invade her flowers’ personal space. It’s something she inherited from her own mother who was one of the sweetest old ladies you’d ever want to meet but she was death to all things weed related. I have very vivid memories of her on her hands and knees yanking what she called “nutgrass” out by the root in her front yard and of her being very angry if any of us grandchildren let a wayward football or whatever make its way into her flower beds.

On my wife’s side, her own mother is some sort of “plant whisperer” or something. They live out in the middle of nowhere in rural Lee County and that whole place is just covered in a wide variety of plants and flowers and trees and shrubbery. They grow a pretty impressive half-acre or so vegetable garden. My wife’s grandmothers both shared the gift of growing things (one has since passed on, while the other is “retired” from gardening, except in an emeritus and/or supervisory role).

I said all of that to say this: That sort of thing must like to

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skip a generation every so often, because neither I nor my lovely wife have had any success whatsoever over many years and many attempts at growing much of anything.

Now I know part of this is that we both will start out with great enthusiasm over the idea of growing a garden or planting a flower bed or whatever, but then we either get busy or get bored or we just don’t have the “touch” that our forebearers have, because we can’t get it right.

Well, anyway, like I said, my daughter decided on the vegetable garden, and since I am always the one that gets roped into her little adventures, that meant that I also was involved in the vegetable garden.

So, a while back, we borrowed a tiller from my inlaws, picked out a little 10– by-20 patch of the backyard, tilled it up, put down compost and manure and garden soil, went and got seeds and all that.

Well, “all that” used up about 90% of our energy and enthusiasm, but we did manage to get the seeds in the ground, although instead of doing nice, neat little rows, we basically “scattered seeds,” which, last I checked was how they did it in the Bible, so if it’s good enough for Abel it’s good enough for me.

Here’s where it gets tricky though… you see, right about that time was when all of my daughter’s summer church camp and band camp and vacation with the boyfriend’s family and softball practice kicked in, meaning she had long stretches where she wasn’t going to be home… and I’m sure you can see where this is going.

So, with her basically out of the equation, it was up to me to keep this garden going, and full disclosure, that 10% of the energy and enthusiasm I had left lasted about a week into that long spell of triple-digit-heatindex weather we had going for a while, and there was no way I was going to spend large swaths of time out in the backyard pulling weeds and fertilizing and watering and all of that.

Suffice it to say that when I went outside yesterday to mow the lawn, I fully expected to see nothing but dead plants.

Now the grass has definitely crept its way back in to the garden area and there were some barren patches where some things simply never took off (I think maybe the cucumbers and perhaps the potatoes), but to my surprise, there in dirt were several thriving purple- hull pea plants, burgeoning sprouts of cabbage, promising patches of okra and what I believe are the beginnings of some carrots! There were even a few teeny-tiny tomatoes on the three tomato plants we planted in the interior of an old tire.

I’m not saying I’ve got the green thumb or anything, but it is neat to see the garden is still viable. I did officially declare to my daughter that she is back on garden duty though, so it’s up to her to make it or break it at this point.

As for me, I’ll be inside here in the air conditioning.