[Editor’s note: Today would have been my friend Dor’s 65th birthday. She passed away in March, just after NJ started sheltering in place, so her death was eclipsed by the pandemic. Today, in her honor, I am posting this piece. I am eternally grateful to her for insisting I could garden. Turns out, she was right.]
“I signed up for a gardening class,” I announced at the dinner table one day. We were having a family dinner that included our adult children and their families. We recently purchased a new house and I was eager to see if we could be more successful gardening with a fence than we were in the last house where there was no fence, but plenty of wildlife. And, the wildlife had eaten well from beds of lilies, daisies, echinacea and other various landscape plants.
“Tell me you’re kidding,” my husband said, “You are horrible at gardening.” My husband is a fairly seasoned gardener and used to keep a beautiful flower garden before the wildlife multiplied faster than we could build protective fences.
“Mom do you really think you are the gardening type?” This from my daughter, the family voice of reason, although it was clear from every face at the table that she was speaking for the lot of them.
I looked back at them undeterred. “No, I am not kidding,” I said to my husband and, to the rest of them I said, “No, of course I am not the gardening type. AND, I am taking a gardening class. It is offered through The Suppers Program, which I might remind you is a learn-by-doing program. I think this means that they will dummy it down for people like me. In fact, I believe that people like me might be their target audience. And, either way, I am taking the class.”
I happen to know that I was the first to sign up for the class because somewhere between registering and getting to the first class, I called Dorothy Mullen, founder of The Suppers Program and gardener extraordinaire, in a complete panic. The instant the garden email arrived in my in-box, I registered, throwing caution to the wind. Now that we were getting closer to the first class, I was beginning to realize just how little I knew about gardening. There were emails telling us this and that and each had terms that I didn’t know or didn’t understand. I told Dor that perhaps I was in over my head and that I should reconsider. Dor assured me that I would leave the first class with everything I needed to be successful. She reminded me that there were other novice gardeners in the group and the program, like much of what Suppers offers, is built on equal parts knowledge and experimenting. Honestly, if this were any other organization, I would have withdrawn and gotten my money back; but I have been around enough Suppers’ events to know that this program would likely be foolproof.
The first day of the first class was both exciting and scary at the same time. In typical Suppers style, they had everything I could have possibly needed, so that when I left class that day, I was prepared to plant seeds and watch them sprout to life. That was very inspiring. The scary part was that most of what was said in that first meeting was unintelligible to me. I have a fair vocabulary and am good with context clues, but, honestly, some of what was said seemed like word salad to me – pun intended, by the way. Luckily, there were a few of us who were brand new to gardening, so there was question upon question to which we were provided answer upon answer. Each gardener had unique situations, which was one of the best parts. There were yards where the garden was shared between the gardeners and the wildlife, there were gardens on the balconies of small condominiums, there were shade-less gardens, deep shade gardens, fenced in gardens, large rambling fields of gardens and everything in-between.
We got a folder of gardening resources, watched a video, ate soup and then off we were to start planting seedlings in little six packs of starting trays. We were a group of twelve women almost giddy as we exchanged envelopes of different seeds: zinnias, cucumber, snap peas, kale, Asian lettuce. We planted, labeled, planted, labeled and it felt really magical, but also really structured all at the same time. We knew what we were planting, but besides that, it was stepping into the unknown. And then, get this, we had a lesson in how to plant a garden inside of a bale of hay. I’m not kidding. You can actually grow stuff right in the middle of a bale of hay!!! Which means you can grow row after row of plants on black top, if black top is all you have. Who knew?
I arrived home with my bale of hay and trays of seedlings. I brought my seedlings into the house and situated them in a sunny corner of my living room and waited. Over the next few weeks, those little seedlings created a whole new world in my life. To begin with, once home I realized that I had no idea how much water was too much water and worried that I would drown or under water my plants. I happened to be going by the Rutgers Master Gardeners’ Program in Ewing Township, so I stopped in there and the nice man behind the counter told me everything I needed to know about watering. I told him that I had looked this information up on the internet, but I was still unsure and felt like I needed to see how much water and what the soil looked like in person. He was great. Like Dor, he worked with all levels of gardeners and he was happy to impart his knowledge. Turns out, you can call the Rutgers Master Gardeners’ Program and ask them any stupid question you want and they don’t even laugh at the question.
I have to say, my grandchildren were my biggest fans. My grandchildren were very interested in my seedlings. It was an eye-opening experience to consider my new gardening project from the eyes of my 5 year-old granddaughter and my 3-year old grandson. To them, when they looked at the seed trays, they saw dirt.
“D”, my grandchildren call me D, “you have dirt in your living room.”
“Oh, well, it isn’t just dirt. It is the beginning of my garden. Inside the dirt, are seeds. I planted the seeds and they are going to grow into plants. When they get big enough, I am going to plant them in my garden.”
“When will they grow?”
“I’m not sure, but in a few weeks.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know?”
“Yeah, how do you know they will grow. Are the plants under the dirt?”
“Not exactly. There are SEEDS under the dirt. The seeds will become plants and then the plants will pop their little heads out of the dirt. I have to keep them in the sun and water them. We can watch them each week.”
Sure enough, each week when they would come over, they would rush over to check on the progress of our plants. One time, when I looked up, I noticed that my grandson was holding all of the little white markers indicating the names of the plants. I watched as he put the markers in the soil, then took them out, then put them back, then out again. When asked, he told me he had fixed them all for me. For the next few weeks, I had no idea which plants were which when I looked at those trays. It’s an experiment, I reminded myself. And, besides, I loved that the children were interested.
It might be that the best part of gardening was sharing it with others and watching how contagious gardening became. Our backyard has two large round decorative containers that were left here by the previous owners, so the children and I decided we would plant flowers that would attract butterflies. I bought them their own gardening tools and one Sunday we planted flowers. It seemed like forever, but eventually, both containers were bursting with flowers and, sure enough, the yard was filled with black and blue flecked butterflies. The children were delighted to see the butterflies and we talked about how we had invited them by planting the flowers. Although I am well aware that planting flowers to attract butterflies, and then attracting the butterflies is a logical progression, there was a part of it that still felt like magic to me. It certainly felt like magic to the children and they would reference my “knowledge” to other family members. Soon they would say things like “D said we could plant flowers and butterflies would come and we saw butterflies today!”
Following the butterflies, were the caterpillars. One day I went out to the yard to pick parsley to cook with, and the next day when I went out, the parsley was completely gone. In its place were these huge, plump caterpillars. I had never seen anything like it. They were two or three inches long, looking like green and dark blue striped mini-sausages, all just marching through my herb garden. I took a picture and sent it to Dor who immediately responded and asked if I was going to “preserve them.” I had no idea what she was talking about. For one brief moment, I thought she wanted me to pickle them, or somehow press them between the pages of a book. Turns out that the caterpillars like to eat the parsley, but the birds like to eat the caterpillars and, without intervention, the caterpillars were likely to become dinner for the birds. I scooped up the caterpillars, got one of those net caterpillar houses and brought them inside. The children and I watched them for an entire weekend and then, sure enough, almost overnight they had spun themselves into cocoons.
There is something about having a garden that was then, and still is now, difficult for me to describe. As noted, I was not a gardener and, in fact, the only plants I have ever owned are alive because my husband waters them. And, I cannot even say what on earth prompted me to register for the course when the email arrived in my in-box; but both 2018 and 2019 were really difficult years for our family and I think I somehow knew I needed to be engaged in activities that were life affirming. I kept thinking I need to create, I need to grow and the Universe kept whispering “plant…plant…plant.” Tending to the garden, watering it, pulling weeds, all of that pulled me outside of myself, even if it was just to walk through the yard, to be out-of-doors, to breathe, to focus on what was bound to grow. It was life affirming and it was soothing to my soul in a way that I never expected. I had worried that the garden would be another thing on my already too long to-do list, but, on the contrary, it was the one thing I did that brought me joy. And, let me tell you, it wasn’t like I had a huge garden. I had two 6X4 foot patches and one 4X2 foot patch. But in those patches, I grew snap peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, kale, lettuce, zinnias, sage, parsley, rosemary and basil. It was magical. I loved checking on it each day, watching day after day of absolutely nothing happening followed by a burst of growth and discovery.
I know it is very cliché to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway – at the end of the summer I was a completely different human being because I had a garden. I can barely stand how sappy that sounds, and I would ordinarily find a much more poetic way to say that, but it is just so doggone true. I think completely differently because I gardened this summer. I learned the mechanics of gardening, the planting, watering, weeding and all of that. But more than that, I feel like I created this personalized ecosystem right in my own backyard. My grandchildren and I shared the experience of having been a part of the ecosystem that we created, of eating vegetables that we picked right there out of the garden, of inviting butterflies and creating a refuge for the caterpillars. I grew food and then I cooked all summer with food I grew, which is a seriously cool experience. I loved saying “this dish is seasoned with herbs from my garden….this salad and herbs are all from my garden…I pickled these vegetables that I grew in the garden.” The experience was magical, it was healing, it grounded me to the earth and, more importantly, to myself.
The garden is now long gone, resting for the winter months. As much as I loved gardening, the rest of this season also feels so right. I now know that part of gardening is also letting the garden rest. It is the inactive part of gardening that I do these days. I cook with the herbs that are now drying in my pantry. I am a bolder cook this winter because I grew the herbs and I know them much better than when I used to buy them at the store. I cannot wait for the holidays where I will gift people vinegars flavored with herbs from my garden and, in the meantime, I am watching the birds at the feeders, dreaming of what I will plant next year and who we will invite to the garden.