Five years ago I started a backyard garden. The summer before my teenage son had died of cancer, and I was having trouble staying out of depression enough to care for the rest of my family. I decided to learn something new, and somehow hit upon gardening.
I had tried a garden years before, but the backyard at that house was very shady, and instead of garlic and tomatoes, I got mushrooms where ever I turned the soil. I quickly gave up.
This house was different. The yard was large- a tenth of an acre- and mostly sunny. I spent the winter following David’s death wrapped in a blanket, crying, staring off into space, and reading books on vegetable gardening.
In February, snow was still on the ground in Northern Illinois. I had decided on raised beds, so we went out and put cardboard down on the lawn where I wanted the beds. I piled snow on top to keep it from blowing away.
We were broke. Looking back, I’m sure that was part of the reason I chose gardening. Cancer is both cruel and expensive. We had sold the house we owned (the one with the shady yard). We were renting now, and were barely making ends meet. I could no longer afford a balanced diet all the time. The electric kept getting shut off. I thought that gardening at least might keep us in lettuce.
We knocked together frames from scavenged 2x4’s, and put them on top of the cardboard in the snow. I was given a pound of composting worms, and set up a plastic bin in the basement for them, and was rigorous about letting no scrap of paper, vegetable matter, or cardboard go anywhere but to the worms.
To fill the raised beds, I had a plan.
The year before the city stopped picking up yard waste with the general garbage collection. Instead, you could only put out yard waste in paper bags twice during the year, on certain dates. Down the street was a house with an enormous yard full of trees. A yard crew had come in and filled 20 or 30 big leaf bags with yard waste, but the owner had missed the fall collection. The bags were sitting in a corner of the yard, awaiting the spring collection. I asked for, and received, all the bags. With a plastic sled, I brought them back to my yard one and two at a time. They were full of mostly composted mowed grass and chipped up leaves. Most I dumped out directly into the waiting frames, but there were 6 or 7 bags left, even after heaping the raised beds full. So the rest was fed to the worms, along with the empty leaf bags, bit by bit over the next few months.
I started planting in April. By then, the full beds had sunken down to barely 3 inches thick, but the cardboard underneath was rotted, and I was able to access the soil below by poking holes into it.
You have to remember, I was no gardener. I had read some books from the library, but I knew very little about it all. (I still feel pretty much a novice.) But I had beginners luck. I watched the peas, and noticed each blossom. I saw the miniature pods grow from the petals, and waited until they were swollen with tiny peas. One finally got fat and bumpy like the picture on the seed packet. I picked it, and pushed the ends to pop it open. Inside were two perfect peas. I looked at them and felt something I hadn’t felt since before David’s diagnosis. I felt joy. I put the two little precious peas in my mouth, and they were cool, smooth and sweet. I realized I was smiling. It had been so long since I had smiled without forcing myself that tears rolled down my cheeks. My oldest daughter came outside and stood by me. I found another pod that was nearly ready, and gave it to her. “We grew peas.” I said. She fumbled and opened her first fresh pod of peas, and ate them. “They are sweet. I never knew peas were sweet.” She said, marveling.
I grew peas, green beans, lettuce, pak choi, spinach and mizuna. The seeds I got free from a seed exchange at the library. I had none to exchange, but everyone was very nice, and gave me the extras they thought I could grow easily. Most of all, they gave me wise, simple, easy to follow advice, without which my first garden would have been an abysmal failure. But with their help, I picked the most delicious peas, the sweetest beans, and fresh salads that any chef would have been proud of. I felt like I was growing gold.
In June, someone from the seed exchange stopped by with some good sized tomato and pepper plants and some weedy-looking groundcherry starts. On their advice I took out my now-bitter and bolting greens and browning peas, added all the worm compost I had been collecting, and put in the tiny starts. Luckily, the beans had just started producing, so we weren’t without vegetables. By the middle of July, tiny golden tomatoes appeared, and the first papery ground cherries dropped. My toddler granddaughter loved crawling in under the low branches to pick them up. The rest of the summer she went out daily to lay in the garden bed and eat ‘her’ fruits. The peppers grew into long bananas and fat blobs with both ends poked in that went from green to ruby red. We had tiny yellow lightbulb-shaped tomatoes, bunches of medium-sized red tomatoes, and several plants of giant tomatoes that I picked both green for frying and red for eating out of hand. Very few fresh, ripe tomatoes made it long enough to be cooked into any food. They were too good, just picked and warm from the sun.
There was an old door in the basement that I propped up like a table in the yard so we could eat outside. We spent hours there. We talked about David, and now and then we laughed. I remember that first laugh. My three daughters and I were sitting by the garden, and it was getting to be dusk. My granddaughter had crawled out of a garden bed with her cheeks stuffed full. Her mother said, “Have you been eating all the groundcherries?” and she shook her head no. We all laughed, and then abruptly stopped because it sounded so odd. It had been so long.
That summer changed everything for our family. We came out of mourning. Our days had been gray, each of us lost in our own fog of introspective pain. Food was an afterthought, eyes were for crying. But with that first peapod we started to rediscover wonder. We could share experiences again. We admired the tiny yellow tomato flowers. We noticed bumble bees. We watched yellow and white moths in their fluttering dance over our garden in the afternoon and in the evening marveled at the lightning bugs. Simple things became important. We learned to look forward to the sun, and appreciate the rain. Salads became family celebrations. A bunch of ripe tomatoes could shared and savored. The guilt of survival dulled enough for us to be close again. We breathed in and out, felt the warmth, tasted the food, and were happy to be alive.