Origin Story Part 4: In the garden

The things I couldn't have known

The kitchen garden, 2022

We picked the worst possible spot to put our garden.

It was boggy, partially shaded by the maple trees in summer, and had been used as a trash heap for half a century. We didn’t know about the bog or the trash because the spot was entirely choked with weeds, and though we knew the maple trees existed, we didn’t think their shade would matter that much.

That’s how little we knew about gardening.

We had a few good reasons for picking the spot: it was close to the house (and, consequently, running water), it was at least partially sunny, and the rest of the yard was either mowed grass or overgrown perennial flower beds. It was chosen because it was a weedy wasteland. It seemed like low stakes for two people whose gardening resumes might read “successfully kept house plants alive for 2+ years.”

The beginnings of the kitchen garden, 2015

We did a lot of research, of course. We built our raised beds out of cedar, and rented a trencher so that we could bury our wire fence the requisite twelve inches underground to deter tunneling by groundhogs. We were both relentlessly mocked by passing farmers (“What are you building, Fort Knox?”) and spooked by them (“I knew somebody who lost their whole garden in a night to woodchucks.”) Once, we came out of the house to see that there was a rabbit trapped inside our garden. Still don’t know how that could’ve happened.

There’s so much that we couldn’t have known.

My husband and I are planners, researchers, project manager types. A new friend once described us as “highly competent people” which I think was a gentle way of saying we were kind of intense Type A personalities. The thing about gardening, especially making one from scratch, is that there is an infinite amount of research to be done—so much so that it can become insurmountably overwhelming even for “highly competent people.” At some point, we had to admit that there was no way we could be fully prepared and we started putting plants in the ground and hoped for the best.

We made that boggy garden spot work after much trial and error. Eventually, we realized we needed a full-sun row garden (the “big garden”) to grow different and more food, and we failed a few times at that too. We made it too small, didn’t use landscaping fabric, then didn’t use the right landscaping fabric, then decided it was in the wrong spot and moved it entirely. We have blueberry bushes that have been planted and moved three times who still haven’t fully forgiven us.

The "big garden" before and now.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but while gardening sometimes felt arduous, it was a sort of thought exercise played out. We were attempting to grow food because we wanted to, because we believe in it, and because that is what people do where we live. But ultimately, we had the privilege of being able to afford fresh food from the somewhat distant grocery store, or even the equally distant farmer’s market (Dollar General is the only non-convenience store food source within 30 minutes of us and those who live nearby.)

No, our garden had a lot to do with ideology with a healthy dose of ego and accomplishment attached. We wanted to prove something to ourselves, to get better at a skill, to make good use of what we had, and while it was both a deeply humbling and exhilarating experience, it was something that we could walk away from, that we could neglect if we needed to.

Then we had kids. Our boys, who are 6 and 3, ate their first foods from our garden. They know it far better than I do.

They can more quickly locate the most tender asparagus, which they snap from the ground and eat like carrots. They can identify which plants are weeds and what are seedlings, and I often call them over for a second opinion in early summer to make sure I don’t accidentally uproot a baby kale. They know how to pinch sucker branches off of tomato plants and do so, unbidden. They’re eternally ripping leaves off the spinach plants to “eat like bunnies”, and are the best at judging when a pea pod is ready to be picked. When asked, they can deftly demonstrate how to split it open and vacuum up the peas with a sharp inhalation. In winter, we leave seed catalogs on the counter and they pore over them during breakfast, circling every single plant.

“Tonight,” my oldest said to me, tucked into his flannel sheets one snowy night this winter, “I’m going to dream about the garden.”

There’s so much about gardening I couldn’t have known.