Restoring Eden in Your Backyard
April 24, 2009
by Nancy Sleeth
If I can learn to garden, anyone can.
I grew up in the suburbs. Every spring, I helped my mom plant annuals—petunias in our sunny beds, impatiens in the shade, and a few geraniums in planters. One of my chores was to deadhead the flowers—especially the petunias. Pinching back the dead blooms and leggy stems always left a sticky residue on the tips of my fingers, and the smell of summer under my fingernails.
In early summer, my dad had a load of steaming mulch dumped in our driveway. It was the children’s job to shovel the mulch into the wheelbarrow and spread it evenly around the trees and bushes. I know that everything looks bigger to a youngster’s eyes, but that pile of mulch seemed endless. When we finally scraped up the last shovelful, our yard looked perfect, but I was too tuckered out to play.
By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I discovered a way to avoid most outdoor work. Mom would rather weed in the sunshine than be tied to the kitchen. So I traded outside chores for fixing dinner. I wish I could say that my motives were altruistic, but the truth is that I enjoyed cooking infinitely more than mowing and raking.
I was twenty years old when Matthew and I married—by then skillful in the kitchen, but still with no desire to be a gardener. For the first seven years of our marriage, we mostly lived in apartments where gardening was not an option anyway.
My attitude adjustment occurred during Matthew’s residency, when each family was provided with a modest house to live in for three years. Our next-door neighbors had been raised in a Mennonite farming community. Thinking it would be fun to grow some of our own food with our young children, we decided to start a garden together—they would share their knowledge, and I would weed and water.
The house we were assigned already had a small garden plot adjacent to the garage. I planted easy-to-grow carrots, tomatoes, radishes, and peas—not enough to feed a family, but the look on Clark’s face when he pulled up his first carrot was payment enough for my meager effort. Later we added corn and squash in my neighbor’s plot. Growing food fit my frugal nature, and it got me out of the house. I was hooked.
After Matthew finished his residency, we moved to northern New England. Although the growing season there is short, people plant magnificent perennial gardens. Thanks to generous neighbors who offered to give me divisions from their plants, I was able to plant a spring-to-fall succession of blooms—bluets, violets, and bleeding hearts in spring, followed by hostas, daisies, lilies, bee balm, peonies, and black-eyed Susans, culminating in our annual first-day-of-school photograph in front of the lavishly blooming rose of Sharon.
Learning to work with perennials saved me money—most were free clippings from my neighbors, or inexpensive divisions from the yearly school fund-raiser plant sales—and kept many dozens of throwaway plastic plant containers out of the landfill. Next to my vegetable garden, I planted blueberry bushes and a small orchard of apple and pear trees. Our next-door neighbor told Emma that eating a lot of blueberries helped keep her eyes blue. Emma believed him, so we always saved blueberries to harvest on her August birthday.
The biggest shift in my gardening practices, however, came when we built our house in New Hampshire. I went totally native. Instead of planting grass, I sowed two-thirds of an acre with wildflower seed. The field thrived and attracted wildlife—birds, fox, deer, wild turkeys . . . and tourists. Strangers stopped to ask if they could photograph and paint the field. Neighbors were invited to pick bouquets. Churches used our wildflowers for special occasions.
As a housewarming present, two friends helped us construct raised beds for my vegetable garden. The vegetable garden was so successful the first summer that we decided to double it in size the next, and double it again the next. By the third year, we were growing enough potatoes, carrots, onions, and tomatoes to last year-round. Clark and Emma often weeded with me in the cool stillness of early morning. Matthew used our pressure cooker to can our bounty. It was a family enterprise.
In late winter, I started most of my plants indoors along the south windows of the house. Several neighbors and I bartered over successful seedlings; one summer I was on the receiving end of luscious and prolific yellow pear tomatoes. We were also fortunate to have a family-run organic nursery just up the road, so I could always grab a few plants to fill any gaps.
When we moved to Kentucky, one of my first priorities was preparing a small organic garden on the south side of our house. A friend of a friend donated a truckload of well-aged organic manure. We now use the garden for teaching college students basic gardening skills: how to prepare the earth with compost, rake out the beds, plant the seeds, water and weed, and—finally—harvest, cook, preserve, and feast. When I work with the students, sometimes I get the feeling that I’m an impostor—I still feel very much like an amateur gardener, with so much yet to learn.
Matthew’s family grew the majority of their vegetables, fruit, eggs, chicken, and milk for economic reasons. For a long while, gardening brought back not-so-fond memories for him—of picking potato bugs off plants and endless weeding wars. But recently, Matthew has happily joined me in the garden.
Come evening, when we work in comfortable silence among the rows, it feels like Paradise restored: just as God intended, husband and wife together, tending and caring for the Lord’s earthly garden.
Nancy Sleeth is the author of Go Green, $ave Green: a simple guide to saving time, money, and God’s green earth (www.gogreenthebook.com). She also serves as Program Director for Blessedd Earth (www.blessedearth.org).
Comments
Got something to say?
