I have always loved gardening. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have always loved having a garden. I actually hate all the work that goes into it, such as weeding, hoeing, digging, planting, etc. But nothing beats the feeling of picking your own vegetables from plants that you personally put into the ground and tended for eight to twelve hot, miserable weeks.
My entire life, wherever I have lived, I have planted gardens in the back yard. Sometimes that consisted of nothing more than a three-foot by five-foot planter box with a few tomato plants and a zucchini bush, but I always tried to do something. This year, my garden goals are a little bit more elaborate than they have been in the past. I currently have a large area in the yard tilled, manicured and planted with tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelon, cantaloupe, peppers, corn, and several varieties of squash. Since retiring, I’ve decided to get a little more ambitious with my some of my projects.
When the field was cleared of weeds and the various seeds had all begun to sprout, I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishment. I had done a really nice job. At least, I thought so. Unfortunately, others had different ideas about what I was doing.
Recently, I brought my wife outside to show off all the tiny plants popping up in neat little rows. She asked me what I had planted. I told her, pointing to the various tiny shoots of green as I described what they would one day produce.
“What about carrots and radishes?” she asked.
“What about them?” I asked back, slightly confused by the question.
“You don’t have any,” she stated simply.
Well, she had me there. I had not planted any carrots or radishes. I hadn’t realized that I needed to, but fortunately for me, my lovely wife was there to point out the folly of my oversight. A garden without carrots and radishes is apparently nothing more than a mockery and a slight to the entire gardening community. If the neighbors ever found out I had attempted such a thing, they would rally the village and run us out of our home with torches and pitchforks.
Hanging my head in shame, I climbed into my truck and drove to the nearest landscaping shop to purchase additional planter boxes in which to foster those critically important root veggies. I bought four wine barrels, each one weighing in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds, then wrestled them into the bed of my truck to bring them home.
I’m pretty sure I tore something in my shoulder as I dragged those barrels off the truck and lugged them into the garden enclosure, but I had no time to worry about something so petty as permanently crippling myself. I still had work to do.
Next, was a trip to the rock quarry to buy two thousand pounds of compost and planting soil, followed by an hour of shoveling the mixture out of the bed of my truck into the barrels. When I had finished, I took a few minutes to lie on the ground and rest. Okay, I think I actually passed out, but I can’t be certain because I don’t remember much after I started hallucinating.
When I was confident that I didn’t need to nap any longer and the taste of blood in the back of my throat had gone away, I ran one more errand. This time I went to the local gardening center for seeds and watering equipment.
I finally had everything I needed.
When the seeds were planted, and the sprinklers were set on timers to water them regularly, I once more brought my wife outside to show her the garden.
I had spent seven hours of my day, as well as over $300 dollars from our bank account, to provide something that could have been accomplished at the grocery store in fifteen minutes for under two bucks. But this had been an act of love, not a properly planned economic decision. We might not be able to afford to feed the children dinner tonight, but in six to eight weeks they could have all the carrots and radishes they wanted. (Which would be exactly none, as neither kid liked carrots or radishes.)
Flushed with pride – and perhaps a little bit of heatstroke – I pointed at the barrels of dirt. They weren’t much to see at that moment, but soon they would be teeming with green shoots of potential food. The project might have almost killed me, but I was deeply gratified to see my wife smile and nod at the final results.
Then she glanced around the yard with a perplexed look on her face. She tapped her chin a few times in thought.
Feeling my stomach turn and a sense of dread settling over me, I watched her gesture at an open spot of ground.
“What about lettuce?” she asked.