At the beginning of March, I publicly made the statement that I was going to grow a lush and impressive vegetable garden this year and that nothing could stop me, especially not my own inability to start or finish anything. While I still feel crippled, especially as of late, by that inability to start or finish anything, somehow I managed to pull this shit off. At least the first steps of it.
As of this newsletter, I still need to plant basil and tarragon, maybe some sage, but I have in the ground two habanero plants, one jalapeño, three different varieties of heirloom tomatoes (Cherokee Purples, Brandywines and Old Germans), dill, thyme, mint, an eggplant, cucumber, okra, zucchini, and two different varieties of radishes (French breakfast and Watermelon). I love fresh produce. I love to cook, and when I really crave something, it is always something fresh and crisp and bright. I’m giddy at the prospect of all this beginning to take root in my garden, hopefully. At the very least, if I kill everything else, I think the radishes will be fine.
I wouldn’t say I have a green thumb necessarily, but gardening is something that I’ve always seemed to circle back to in different cycles of my life. One of the first poems I had published was about my attempts to grow tomatoes as a child. My mother used to force us to help her in the flower beds when we were kids, digging around the zinnias. In college I was a member and later president of the Garden Club. Some of my best memories from my time in Wyoming are from the summer of 2020, when I had an AmeriCorps VISTA position with a small organic farm. I dated a guy that Christmas and into my move back home who worked at a garden center and ran a small farming operation, and I tried to learn as much as I could from him, daydreaming about canning tomatoes and pickling everything I could get my hands on.
I don’t know if I am soothed specifically by working in the dirt, like some people describe. I wouldn’t say I find innate pleasure in being on my hands and knees weeding. I would describe it as similar to the feeling of cleaning my house, especially a deep clean (which I did last night, drenching myself in sweat because I have to keep the electric bill low). It’s hard to get started, but once I get going, the rhythm of the action soothes me, it’s repetitiveness that I find both difficult and surprisingly easy. It’s the feeling of being in the middle of the task and all of a sudden seeing what the end will look like, instead of just imagining it. I love having a clean house. I love having a garden. The maintenance of both soothes me, but gosh is it hard for me to get started.
I don’t really know anything about gardening. Or perhaps I should say, I don’t know enough for it to be intuitive, in the way some tasks of home maintenance have become. I know how to thin radishes, the basics of how to trellis tomatoes, the rough timeline of when plants need to go in the ground and to wait until after the last frost in Mississippi that always comes at the end of March. Weeds aren’t hard for me to recognize, and I can tell when the fruit is ripe. But do I really know anything about gardening? Not really.
I think I have enough arrogance to think I can do most things passably, but I don't believe that I can really do anything well or expertly. I have enough arrogance to believe that if I were less lazy, or focused my energy better, I could become skilled at lots of things, if I wanted to be. I think I have a problem of always looking at myself in terms of what I could be, what I could do if I really spent the time and energy, instead of looking at myself for what I actually am. I think there’s a right way to do that, like with gardening. You have to see the possibility of what could happen, but you also have to deal with what’s in front of you.
I have trouble, day to day, dealing with what’s in front of me. I lean too heavily into possibility, drifting along in unrealized reality. I dream of tomatoes plucked ripe from the vine for tomato pie, of cucumbers lush and crisp for pickling. I open my eyes and the soil is fallow. Empty.
What a metaphor, am I right?
At the moment, things feel difficult in the extreme. It’s hard to get out of bed. It’s hard to shower or wash my face, brush my teeth. It’s hard to get to work on time and hard to do anything but lay on the couch and watch Perry Mason until I pass out, laying on top of a lover who somehow isn’t disgusted with me yet. It’s hard not to drink to excess or spend what little money I have on some attempt to ignore how hard everything seems to have become. It’s hard to feel like I’m making any progress or moving forward at all. More often, it feels like I’m just falling further behind.
It’s entirely possible nothing in the garden will bear fruit. I could have been more particular in preparing the soil (a lot more particular actually). I’m worried about maintaining a watering schedule, about fertilizing. But it feels like an accomplishment to have done anything at all. It feels like an accomplishment every time I check on the plants in the morning and the evening, an accomplishment to just pay close attention to something. Even if nothing grows, it feels to me like an accomplishment to have cared enough to try, and to continue trying instead of laying down in defeat. Maybe I’ll learn something. Maybe, eventually, I can even become good at this. But I think mediocre is fine for now.