Photo by C. Nielsen
There’s something about the beginning of things; Bohemian poets are always reveling here: new lovers, fresh starts, changed perspectives. For those of us with underdeveloped Bohemian sensibilities (or Bohemian sensibilities that we try to control), the springtime garden allows us our moment to bask in this line of thinking.
There’s something extraordinarily clean about gardening this time of year – clean in an aesthetic sense. The vegetable patch is plowed and tilled, a perfect square or rectangle with sharp lines. The dark loam stands in stark contrast to the sea of green surrounding it, the dirt fluffed to the point of looking comfortable.
Indeed, one of the most divine pleasures of springtime gardening is that moment when you first plunge your bare feet into this freshly tilled soil. I grid my garden as a first step – I suspect many of you do the same; the dirt soft and cool between our toes, our tracks forming lines of bare footprints, arrow straight like those of a coyote or fox. Before we actually sow the seeds or starts, we linger on the virgin earth. What we feel strikes me as similar to what an artist must feel as he ponders a bare canvas, his mind allowed free reign to imagine subsequent wonder and creation.
Of course my grids are always too small and close together. I’ve grown summer vegetables since I could walk, and yet somehow manage to create causeways just a bit too narrow to fit a rototiller between, rows that ensure that in September, I’ll be picking beans from beneath errant pumpkin vines. I take comfort in the fact that men and women twice my age still seem to have the same special problems, a testament, I think, to a Vermonter’s humble nature. It’s as though every spring we forget just how vigorous these plants get; or perhaps it’s simply a matter of setting ourselves up for pleasant surprises through modest expectations.
Like building a house or falling in love, the success of a garden is tied directly to the time and effort you put into it. In this sense, a garden plot on Memorial Day weekend is either a poured foundation or a first kiss.
The real work is ahead of you.
Soon there will be woodchuck wars, Japanese beetle battles (sorry Johnny), a sticky week in July where the humidity coats your plants with powdery mildew, pigweed, morning glory, lambsquarter – right? – hoe blisters on the webbing between your thumb and pointer finger, peeling skin on your sun-blasted shoulders, August heat that beats your loam into a cracked hardpan, sweaty, bare-chested 100-degree evenings in the kitchen over a canning pot (male and female; you loose your modesty after the twentieth quart), enough bordering-on-not-fun moments that those who don’t garden might think: are you nuts? This is what you do for entertainment?
My knee-jerk response to such questions is to explain that the end result makes it all worth while. When you finally harvest that 50 pound pumpkin that you’ve been watching grow all summer long; when you crush and smell that first clove of pungent garlic; when you sit in the dirt and carve a cantaloupe into wedges, juice in rivulets all down the front of you.
But I think, too, that the beginning time is equally important and just as rewarding. Sowing seeds is like making wishes. A Memorial Day garden is a clean slate.
I was driving to work the other day and I saw a woman sitting on the ground at the edge of her garden plot staring off into a middle distance. I didn’t know her from Eve but I knew exactly what she was thinking.