My 5-year-old son wants to help me plant seeds, and I couldn’t be happier.
Gardening is one of those things at which some people excel, some think they can do but really can’t, and others don’t even bother with.
One of my favorite gardening books isn’t really about gardening. “Plant Dreaming Deep,” by May Sarton, a novelist and poet with 30-odd titles to her name. I love the book. It’s both hilarious and poignant, about her experience buying a chunk of property in the Northeast and learning how to deal with it.
But my favorite part of the book is the title: “Plant Dreaming Deep.”
That’s a good title.
Is the plant dreaming deeply? Are we supposed to plant our dreams deeply? Are such plant dreams, like, really deep? All of the above.
My daughter asked me recently if plants sleep. And if they do, do they dream? That’s one of those parenting moments when you say, “I don’t know. But we can try to find out.”
One of my children’s favorite books was, and is, Growing Vegetable Soup,by Lois Ehlert. In that book, the child helps a parent play in the dirt until things grow. We water and tend and rake, then wait for the sun to do its thing.
What are we doing? We’re “growing vegetable soup,” as the name suggests.
My daughter, the 10-year-old, isn’t much interested in growing plants anymore since I told her what manner of things go into compost. I showed some restraint and never got around to telling her what goes into hot dogs.
For Christmas last year, my wife gave me about 50 packets of seeds. She also gave me the world’s smallest greenhouse, and a directive to move the pile of bricks away from the front porch.
In my defense, the bricks were stacked very neatly and had only been there for about five years. I had a vision for them. When offered about 600 bricks, a bunch of paving stones, and some other cement oddments for $75, you don’t turn it down, right?
“Don’t put them on the porch!” she said. “They’ll be there forever!”
(Five years may be a while-and-a-half, but it’s not forever.)
So, I got the seeds and the greenhouse for Christmas, and already had the bricks, and I’ve always been pretty good at growing things. No more excuses.
My backyard has become a garden.
It already was, in a sense. The previous owner was apparently a fan of azaleas. I had already (over the previous five years) managed to get rid of most of them. Six-inch trunks. Each bush was 10 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter, and I pulled out five over a few years. I bitched about the roots. My wife said, “Well, at least you know you can grow things here.”
I reckon I’ll always grumble about the roots. Pine. Palm. Azalea. Jasmine. They’re resilient and don’t allow me to appropriately use the spade.
I gave some of the old azalea trunk chunks to a friend who makes hand-turned wooden pens. The wood, as it happens, turns a very pretty red after it dries.
One azalea bush remains in that part of the yard. It’s lovely in the spring, under the yellow roses and the white jasmine (both of which were planted by the original owner, who apparently knew something about gardening).
It’s also where my old beagle used to hang out, in his senility, hiding from thunderstorms and refusing to come inside unless carried. That shrub gets to stay. We miss you, Django Bourdain Underfoot. In lieu of a funeral, you get flowers.
Over the winter, the bricks have been arranged in a herringbone-pattern path between two long raised beds, with surrounding brick paths, all bordered by large cement pavers. On a good day, it looks like it was done by someone who knew what he was doing.
The Greenhouse. It’s about 18-by-27. That’s inches, not feet. It’s five feet tall.
When it came, in a box, it had tiny wheels. Those weren’t going to work in my situation. I took off the wheels, using zip ties to strap old railroad spikes at the bottom, instead, and drove them into the ground. That thing’s not going anywhere unless the rest of the backyard disappears along with it.
I put 72 teeny tiny little pots in it about a week ago, and I’ve already got sprouts! I love my sprouts. They have labels, on popsicle sticks, so I can see which are succeeding, and which are underperforming. So far, two kinds of tomatoes, two varieties of cucumbers, some yellow squash, and a few types of peppers have popped out of their beds.
“Rise and shine! Get out of bed, you sleepy heads!”
I peer in daily, and try not to harass them when I see they haven’t accomplished anything in the previous 24 hours. For the first week I did, then felt a little guilty. Most of the seed packets said germination could take 8-10 weeks or more.
It’s been less than a week! I rock at gardening!
I’m trying to be supportive of those that at least appear to be trying, yet I gaze askance at the ones continuing to fail.
I’ve not always been a gardener. I wouldn’t say I am now. But I’m trying. Food is a very important part of life, and of learning. An elderly woman for whom I once worked refused to eat vegetables that she had not grown herself. She was in her 80s. I was in my teens. At the time, I was grateful for occasional cash. Nowadays, I’m thankful for what she taught me.
In his book, Food Rules, Michael Pollan said, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
In the same book he said, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”
Pollan also wrote In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, along with a few others. He’s one of my favorite authors and I generally subscribe to his theories. I don’t always succeed in following Pollan’s advice. I do what I can.
My backyard garden isn’t unusual, or very large. I’m a beginner. But it doesn’t take much to make a difference, either in my life or in the food culture. If nothing else, I get some outside exercise, we get some tomatoes, and my wife is happy because the bricks are gone.
Notable Mississippi native Allan Nation said, in his book The Moving Feast: A Cultural History of Heritage Foods in Southeast Mississippi, that “In 1940, the average distance food traveled before it was consumed was only forty miles.” Now, our food typically travels thousands of miles before we buy it at the grocery store.
And that’s not even the best part.
Nation continued to say that during World War II, about 40 percent of the whole country’s vegetables were produced in backyard “Victory Gardens”, typically for use by the people who grew them, but also to be sold to others.
Whether or not my plants grow to literal fruition or not, at least my son likes to plant seeds with me, his Papa. Sometimes his sister joins in, as long as I don’t talk about cow shit.
The most important part is that together, we’re learning Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, about how to Plant Dreaming Deep, and about the Moving Feast. And along the way, eventually, we’ll grow vegetable soup.
Cloud is a Hattiesburg-based writer and photographer. Until last year, he homeschooled his children. His desire to teach them has not diminished. But his children still won’t eat their vegetables.
