Planting the Garden

This weekend was THE weekend when the garden suddenly called out and said it was ready for plants. Unfortunately, Tom wasn’t around to hear it this year. I guess that means we’re doing it my way this time. What a pity.

The garden falls into a category that makes me nervous. Like other detail work (financial management, housecleaning, laundry, proofreading), I always suspect I’m doing it wrong. Unless I have a big book (or my mom) to advise me, I just use the rule of thumb that I’d better do more of whatever I wish I didn’t have to do at all. In the case of the garden, that means I pulled all the weeds that had grown over the winter. It ought to be satisfying to look out there and see that big empty patch of brown soil, but it isn’t. That’s because we’ve never done it that way before.

Actually, I’ve never done anything at all. And Tom’s never done anything like that. The first year, he just chose the patch of lawn he wanted to turn into a garden, dug up big chunks of grass and topsoil, flipped the chunks over to make a bare space instead of a grassy space, and threw in the plants. Last year, he covered the huge weedy mess with several layers of newspaper, dumped two loads of mushroom compost on the newspaper, and shoved the plants in. I don’t mean to say he doesn’t work hard. He does. He just doesn’t do it anyone else’s way.

Plenty of people are dubious of his techniques, but the plants love him. Maybe they find a kindred spirit in his pure optimism. After all, what is a seedling but an expression of undaunted faith? Tom doesn’t fertilize, or even water all that much, and he weeds pretty sporadically, but his enthusiasm must be contagious, because we’ve had a terrific garden every year.

Our fabulous gardener neighbors are dumbfounded. There was the year they gazed incredulously on our tiny tomato plants braving the March rains. They tactfully mentioned the date when fear of frost is gone in this area—perhaps he didn’t know? Actually, Tom doesn’t fear much of anything, and that includes frost. His tomatoes had a spectacularly long growing season and produced from July to October. Then there was the year he planted watermelon, a big oops in the soggy, tepid Northwest. One of our neighbors thought that was so funny, she planted a fake from the fruit stand under the vine just to get a laugh. The last laugh was Tom’s, though, because he successfully produced not one but TWO watermelons. Everyone else uses elaborate fences and netting to protect their crops from deer; Tom fends them off with a couple of rags soaked in coyote urine (don’t ask).

So it was too bad he was gone this weekend. If he’d been here, we’d have a full-fledged garden instead of just a bare patch of earth. That garden, planted in whatever crazy way he’s chosen, is one of my favorite things about him: his cheerful optimism alive and growing outside the studio window.