42/365 Garden Misunderstandings (History Continues)

"I was just afraid the railroad ties would fall apart," I try to explain my negative attitude. Joey and her landscaper Piper sit on one side of the table, and I sit on the other with Martha. I know she's the anonymous donor but I understand well enough that I'm not supposed to know.

"What about concrete pavers?" Piper asks. She opens a binder and shows us options. They rather generic, without much character, but they would be sturdier. I say so.

"Ok, I'll talk to my source on those," she says, closing the binder. Martha has a worried look on her face. "Now, the fence."

We talk about the iron fence. About a gate. Yes or no to the gate. What kind of gate. Then I ask what later seems like the stupidest question:

"So are we going to have a set up like the community gardens? Are we going to lease plots to parishioners first and then open them up to the neighborhood?"

All three of them stare at me like I've just yelled, "I have rabies!"

"No, nothing like that," Martha shakes her head after she recovers from my apparently shocking question.

And then they continue as if I'm no longer there. Shunned, I listen to the discussion. Serviceberry tree or redbud? White redbud? Holly? Male and female pair? Then Piper opens her binder again and shows me the diagram for the first time. The school part is along one side. Oh. That makes sense, I guess. I process the new information and sit silently, feeling the creeping sensation of "I'm redundant at this meeting", which is a feeling I will have so many times in the years to come at the parish. But here more than ever before or after, frankly. We adjourn soon after and I head upstairs to my classroom to look out the window at the lot.

It'll be good to have the asphalt gone, I tell myself. A nice green space in the city. Not every green space has to have a use. It takes me several self-reincarnations to realize that usefulness is not the only scale upon which something should be measured. It will be good just to have it not be asphalt.

I don't know, standing there at the windowsill, that years later I'll witness Easter fires in that garden. Or that even the next year, it will become an obsession of mine and my friend Mary's, along with the library and so many other little nooks and crannies at the school. I can't know, standing there, that I'll get hot under the collar about this little lot. I don't know how it will all end. All I see right at that moment is a wasted space that's about to become a green wasted space.

But it will grow on me.

57/365 But it's not all wine and roses (history)

While I eventually came to an understanding with Joey, it wasn't that we were bestest best friends. The second autumn of the garden came along and we as a school harvested a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grew an heirloom variety of indeterminate vines and I didn't stake or cage them. Not that I hadn't intended, but my personal life kind of fell apart over the summer when I miscarried and it took a while to bounce back. In that bounce back, I had cake and coffee at Joey's house so she could tell me how sorry she was to hear I'd miscarried. She'd been trying for a while and had resorted to IVF, which had failed several times.

"I can't imagine what it would be like to get pregnant and then lose the baby," she said, and I think she meant it. I ate cake and tried not to think too much about it. I would be pregnant in October but here it was August and it was all still so bad.

But the summer drew to a close and school started up. We donated tomatoes to the food pantry. We let kids take them home. I had brief visions of the future, using produce from the garden in school lunches--nowadays this is the hip education thing to do. Back then though it seemed revolutionary.

So I walked out of school one afternoon and went around to the garden to tend things.

The school raised bed had been replaced with something from an alternate universe. The tomatoes were gone. In their place were impatiens, mums, and pansies. It must have taken someone all day to do this and yet nobody came to tell me? I stood there staring at the damned little flowers and got really angry.

I went inside to Sr. Fern. "What happened to the tomatoes? We were still harvesting--it's only late September."

"Oh," she faked surprise. "Joey told me you said it was done. There's a donor coming to look at the school this evening and she wanted it to look nice. It's only tomatoes," she said as an apology.

"Right," I snapped back. I picked up my canvas bag with the last of the tomatoes alongside my grade book and lesson plans and walked out. Coming out onto the parking lot, there was Fr. Bill walking up to go into the school.

"Why did Joey get to tear out the school garden and plant flowers?" I spit out at him. "Flowers?"

"She said the growing season was over," he repeats the same excuse. "I think some people complained that it looked messy."

"It's fall," I waved my arms the air. "Part of gardening with kids is letting things get a little messy. Plants die. But they weren't even dead!"

"Well," but he stops, for the first time in my experience, with nothing to say or to calm me down with.

"Just because she's good with ONE THING," I yell at him, pounding my fist in the air as if I were hitting a table. "It doesn't make her an expert on everything!"

He doesn't reply. I walk away from him there, not caring who saw me--dismissal time, of course, is filled with people. I get in my car just as I see her pulling up in her SUV. I don't wave back.

She comes up to my room the next day. "Hey," she interrupts class.

"Hi, Joey, I can talk to you in a minute."

"No, I just wanted to drop this off for you." I walk over to the door and she hands me a huge basket of tomatoes. A huge basket. Like, feed a family of 4 for a week kind of huge basket of tomatoes. I take it with both hands.

"I should have talked to you first," she apologizes. I nod, but I'm over being angry. "In other news," she continues more brightly, "we got a grant."

"That's great," I smile thinly. "Thanks for the tomatoes."

I take them home. There isn't a single conflict between us from then on.

123/365 Floral Guilt

Due to the recurring dream about not tending the flowers (and whatever else I've let go astray) I take a moment from gardening this morning and run to church to water.

The door is unlocked. Wedding.

I go in, and it's silent. I rush up into the sanctuary, only to find that everything is still alive. Not even especially tired looking. I water things, suddenly pleased with the world and the things in it. And I rush back out to go tend my own garden back at home.

238/365 Gardening

I had a good, but unexpected, garden this year. Tomatoes, my usual standby, produced nothing. Beautiful plants, blooms, green tomatoes, and nothing went anywhere. Green fruit rotted on the vines. My cucumber plants, however, were insanely productive. I "put up" 18 quarts of pickles. Crazy. The basil and parsley produced average years, turning in to pesto for the freezer. And the garlic was prolific, mostly because I neglected to harvest much last year.

Each of those plants tells me a story. It's so hard, the older I get, to not see things through a parable lens. I expected nothing from the cucumbers, for instance, because they have always, for as long as I've lived here, let me down. I put up poles from them to climb but otherwise did nothing. They were planted only because I needed to let that side of the garden rest from several years of tomatoes being planted there. It was time to rotate but I wasn't going to help them. By the time I picked the last cucumber, they were covered in aphids and ants and ladybugs and parisitic wasps and caterpillars and cucumber beetles. They gave their all. Maybe I just hadn't given them what they needed in terms too much attention or not the right location. Sometimes you just need to be left alone to do what you need to do. In the right place.

Tomatoes have always produced. Some years they're better than others, but we always have salad tomatoes and something to put up--either tomato sauce or frozen tomato puree or even salsa verde if there's an early frost warning. But they've always been at home on the east side of the garden, and I moved them to the west to give the soil a year to rest from their needs. And they obviously were not pleased with the relocation. Who ever is?

The basil and parsley are low-maintenance crops, growing wherever and always producing--since their crop is just leaves, and they aren't prone to bolting (and bitterness) like lettuces, they don't take much. Just hot sun and watering. The most basic of needs and the most basic of returns--but if I fussed over them, they wouldn't produce any more than they do this way. You give what you can if you have what you need. More is not always better.

And the garlic? Give them more time to grow and you get better results. They drop their own seeds and I already have next year's seedlings sprouting up where the cucumber plants have been pulled up. They're a weed in my yard, the best weed ever, and we get along just fine. This year I did clip the scapes (the top flower) on about half of them, to get a bigger bulb to grow, but not all of them. Some of them have to seed and drop for next year. I can't have everything I want or else there's nothing for the future.

See? Not deep or profound, but everything is a lesson these days.