The Year I Became a Gardener
Reflections on the 2023 Growing Season
Top Note: So much awfulness has been going on in the world that it feels a little frivolous to be writing about my silly little garden. And while this post is about just that (my silly little garden), I wanted to place a reminder at the top that Gaza is still under siege, that the death toll continues to climb (over 8,000 and rising) and that nearly half of those deaths are children. It is horrifying to witness, but even more so to know that our government is effectively supporting this war with our tax dollars. Meanwhile, there are still over 200 Israeli hostages in Gaza whom the Israeli government seems less committed to rescuing than to waging all out war on Gaza citizens.
While it seems our tiny little actions might have little effect (something many of us feel with the climate crisis), it is imperative we do what we can to hold our government accountable. As such, keep calling on Congress to call for a ceasefire now!
With that, here is my post about my silly little garden.
My gardening season has effectively come to an end. I harvested the last tomatoes and have four giant butternut squash sitting on my counter waiting for me to figure out what to do with them. And with that, the tilling and obsessing and worrying and constantly inspecting and eventually enjoying what I grew is done for the year.
My conclusion? I did it. I gardened. I had a garden and it was pretty successful. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I am now a gardener.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know how monumental that statement is. Up until now, I’ve considered myself squarely in the “Gardener Wannabe” category. Someone who loves the idea of gardening, but can’t quite pull it off.
Last year’s attempt didn’t do much to move the needle on my gardening prowess. The only successful things I grew were 15 heirloom tomatoes (13 of which I could eat before the squirrels got them) that took 5+ months to ripen and, in the end, were just okay. Although nearly everything else I planted in 2022 failed, I was obsessive that season, particularly about the tomatoes. And I very much appreciate all the social media followers who obsessed along with me because it was so much fun.
I did make headway, though, which was a delightful surprise to my mom.
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What I do think last season did for my gardener identity, though, was encourage me to learn from my mistakes. This time, I planted regular old tomatoes and I spaced my plants out appropriately. I had at least overcome my forgetfulness of watering in 2022 thanks to my general obsession with those tomatoes. So in many ways, last summer led me to this 2023 growing season.
At the beginning, I had the same intentions I did in 2022: to meticulously plan out every square inch of the garden. But come May and the early onset of 80-degree weather, I started panicking when I didn’t do one bit of planning. I did, however, order a grab bag of seedlings from my son’s school’s plant sale. Which turns out was just fine with a few additional plant store seedlings and the winter squash and bush bean seeds I planted straight in the ground.
What I gained this growing season was less a compendium of knowledge about plant growth and soil composition and spacing and companion planting. What I discovered is that we’re all just making this shit up as we go along and that’s okay. Now I’m not talking about the real deal gardeners and farmers. I’m talking about the casual backyard gardeners who start a garden one year and with each year, they get a better sense of what their garden can do and what they can do.
What I realized is that I thrive on spontaneity when it comes to gardening. I already know I’m not a perfectionist. (Which any close reader of this newsletter will know by the regular typos and occasional mistakes like calling NIMBYs a not-in-my-neighborhood type rather than not-in-my-backyard 🙂).
And so with the 2023 growing season, I became a gardener in that I embraced my lack of perfectionism. Interestingly, this realization only occurred to me recently when it seemed like some kind of divine universal message kept coming to me at a truly glorious Scribente Maternum writing retreat I was a part of coordinating last weekend. I felt like many versions of the quote “don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress” kept popping up in conversation.
In fact, Kimberly King Parsons, who led an incredible session on activities that help push through writing block read this quote from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
“...a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seemed that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
The point is that perhaps one of the best things we can do is to just do it and go from there.
This ideas was planted (see what I did there?) in my brain in the summer on a visit to my friend, Alli’s in Missoula (you may remember Alli from a post about the fires last June). Alli has been growing a robust backyard garden for years. By the time my friend Kate and I got there, the garden was a veritable jungle with the basil up to our noses and the cherry tomatoes growing at a rate that Alli could barely keep up with. When the gardening novices Kate and I asked Alli what her secret was, she told us that she’s just been winging it all these years. Over those years of winging it, she’s built up knowledge about what goes well where and that sometimes it’s okay to just let things go. I imagine the failures have added up over the years, but instead of bumming her out, they’ve led to the next step.
I realized I’d been employing this already in my own way. When the leaves on my zucchini plant began yellowing and curling in on themselves, I had to wing it by Googling. The answers weren’t much help because it seemed they were due to anything from underwatering to overwatering to under fertilized soil. I did my best and revived the plant a little bit and was able to get a couple zucchinis later in the season. I was naturally disappointed because the zucchini plant in past gardens had often been the sole plant I could actually grow successfully as it did quite well through neglect.
Yet, the garden thrived.
The tomatoes grew throughout the season, we were constantly harvesting cucumbers, the bush beans were full and bushy (although I realized this season I do not like cooking with bush beans), and my squash plant took up half of our yard. I expected none of this. Yet here I am in late October and I still have fresh food from my garden.
Even with all of this success, I actually think the thing that makes me more of a gardener is the amount of time the garden occupies my brain and conversations with others. Throughout the growing season, I was sending texts to my gardening-expert sister and mother asking questions about what the hell to do with my stupid yellowing zucchini plant or sharing my regular bounties of tomatoes and cucumbers. I texted pictures to Alli and Kate of the squash and the tomatoes and we wondered together about whether the fall rain would ruin my tomatoes.
I became a gardener because I cared. And in fact, this makes me realize that last season I was a gardener, too. Despite the fact the garden didn’t produce much in 2022, I obsessed over those tomato plants and I was out there every day watering and inspecting and pruning.
I suppose I’ve been a gardener all along.
Put those butternuts in a warm windowsill for a few weeks to cure! It will make them last longer. :)