I put away the garden of the summer of 2010 this morning. It was a fair year—more productive than some disastrous gardens we’ve had, not nearly as bountiful as 2002, or as 1981, our biggest and best garden ever. The “goodness” or “badness” of a gardening year is a personal standard set against the outcomes of a lifetime of tended and cared-for plots that have come and gone.
I say “lifetime” as if gardens were as regular as birthdays. But in truth, I’ve only gardened about half my life.
My first attempt was in the early 70s when we planted a few squash plants out back of our apartment during graduate school at Auburn. By the middle of that decade, we’d moved to Wytheville and invested far more enthusiasm than expertise in our first serious, sustained, intentional and accidentally successful garden. The full canning shelves that year brought us so much satisfaction, that we’ve hoped for–but not always had– a garden ever since.
By 1981, we’d moved from town to the country—and at last, had the little homestead that we’d dreamed of. Mother Earth News: we have arrived! There on Greasy Creek, we had 20 acres, no nosey neighbors, the freedom to fail in our own way, and lots of southern exposure.
I took a gardening night class at the vocational school, and got all the peat pots, potting soil and seeds we could possibly use. We grew and threshed our own wheat that first year on the farm, and I planted more than 50 tomato plants in our exuberance. The kids cranked the Squeezo for weeks—a form of child-labor for which they’ve never forgiven me—to make anything that could be made from tomatoes—even ketchup!
Then there were the gardenless years back in Birmingham, 1987 to ‘89, when we had neither the time, the yard space or surplus energy to work the fill dirt of suburbia. But as soon as we landed in Sylva, NC, I bought a Honda tiller to replace the Troy-bilt we sold when we left Wytheville, and we were gardening again. And after moving to Morganton (NC) in ‘91, a half-block from the town’s Rec Center, we put in a garden so close to the public sidewalk, I was afraid it would surely be vandalized. It was.
We moved to Walnut Knob, way out on the parkway, in 1997, and were overcome with gratitude the first time we stepped inside that little fenced garden and orchard to dig our hands deep in the dark loam. But we knew that was not going to be our final garden. There was some place we belonged, and we waited for it to be revealed to us.
That ultimate home place turned out to be exactly where I sit today, in a frost-pocket deep valley with rocky soil, our garden now inside the deer-resistant stockade fence, from which I have just come. We’ve gardened here since the summer of 2000. It is the last place we will grow vegetables, Lord willing, as we hope not to leave this place alive.
So there will be a final garden one of these years, it occurred to me this morning as I pulled the cherry tomato vines from the eight-foot cattle-panel walls of our vegetable fortress. It might not be this one; the statistics of aging and our health histories favor a bit of a future yet.
“The meat is always sweeter, the closer you get to the bone” I heard my parents say so long ago, and didn’t know what they meant by it.
I do now.
At some point, I will have planted my last seed, pulled my last weed, eaten my last home-grown bean, and washed the garden grit from under my fingernails with a satisfied sense of accomplishment for the last time.
This admission of finality’s approach becomes more profound with every passing season, but it isn’t oppressive. The notion of an end brings not so much sadness as appreciation, not so much a sense of loss as a determination not to take a single seed, weed, or ray of sun on our shoulders for granted in the summers we have left.
It looks mighty empty and forlorn out there this afternoon, all bald and bare and brown. But we’re likely to watch the whole show all over again, come May, June, summer, then fall harvest of 2011. I hung up the hoe and mattock today. But not for good. I saved seed from this year’s heirloom beans and tomatoes. And I’ll be ready, come spring, to enjoy next year’s garden as if it were my last.
