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Growing a Green Thumb
When we arrived at our tiny little craftsman house, fresh off the plane from a honeymoon in Central America, the first thing we noticed was the yard. It was one of many little delights and surprises that our loved ones had left us as wedding gifts while we were out of the country. It was nearing dark as I carried my new bride across the threshold, but we could just barely see that someone had done something out there in the yard; it felt cleaner, fresher, and prettier. The next day’s sunrise revealed a freshly mowed lawn, some simple planters had been outlined and cleared of weeds, and a few flowers placed tastefully throughout. It was far from a complete landscaping job; it was an invitation… an invitation my wife bluntly refused.
I would not say that I am a particularly green thumbed individual. In my youth yard work was a chore: my folks were always adapting and changing their yard, and my siblings and I were pressed, rather than recruited into their labor force. In hindsight, the labor was easy and the bosses were more than generous, but to my childhood mind, gardening was a step above the gulag. But familiarity breeds a sort of contentment. By the time I left the house, I was still not anything close to an avid gardener, but I always felt most comfortable if I had something green around me. Largely unbeknownst to me, I also had a base level standard for what a yard should be. When I bought my own house, there was a joy in the process of bringing the dilapidated yard slowly from a scene of chaos and nature unchecked, to one of order (albeit loose), harmony, and beauty, even though * gasp * it was gardening.
My wife, on the other hand, had no such upbringing. The daughter of a contractor and real estate developer, one of eight kids, her childhood was of a very different kind than my own. One plant was the same as the next, and they were all somebody else’s business. Weeding meant mowing, mowing meant wholesale removal. Once in a blue moon, they would try for a garden, but in the mild chaos of her childhood, the plants were quickly forgotten and the garden dried up. In her teen years, however, she had a good friend who loved to grow things. This friend eventually married one of her brothers and became her sister-in-law. My wife observed the skill and attention exhibited by her sister-in-law as one watching a professional baseball player; admiring the talent and enjoying the fruits of that skill, but never dreaming that she herself could ever exhibit such talent or cultivate such fruit.
On our return from Central America, I was inspired by the work of our loved ones and immediately wanted to be in the yard with her; planning our future garden, what flowers should go where, and what kind of trees we might plant. But in the first year of our marriage, all I managed to get her to help me with was planting a few sweet pea seeds; “I can’t grow things, they die around me” was her motto for gardening. But after I watered and weeded those sweet peas, when summer came around, there were beautiful little flowers all over some healthy plants that she had ‘planted’. The next year we had to do a major grading job in the front yard. The sweet peas did not survive the yard renovation, but after the grading was complete, we laid down sod, established some real planters, and my folks and I planted french iris and clivia whose original bulbs were from my great grandfather’s house – after that planting, the offspring of the original plants lived in four generations of homes – my grandparents, my parents, and I had all taken bulbs from my great grandfather’s thriving yard. The finished yard was simple, clean and beautiful. 
My wife physically helped in the development of the landscape, but she was still not invested; hers was a labor of love – she carried a sort of detached amusement – “I don’t see why this is important to you, but I love you, so I guess I’ll help”… And yet, when we planted an apple and a peach tree in that new yard, I watched her take a vested interest in a plant’s health for the first time. She was really looking forward to the fruit from those trees and monitored their progress in a way she never did with the rest of the yard. Unfortunately, we sold the house before the first big harvest came through, but I noted her interest in the fruit and filed away that data point for future use.
It was a year before we had our own place after that, and our new house’s yard was in such disarray, it was some time more before we had the opportunity to grow anything intentionally. In that lull, I think my beautiful bride must have lost what little excitement for growing things she had thus far cultivated because when I finally did get around to building some planters and fencing off a garden area, she was not much interested in planting anything at all. It was me who built the planters, piped the irrigation, amended the soil, bought the seeds and plugs, and fertilized and nurtured that first garden. But remembering her appreciation for the fruiting plants, I coaxed her out into the yard and practically forced her to plant them with me so she could stake some sort of claim to the garden. When summer came, so did the fruits. We hadn’t planted a ton of variety, but it was all healthy and highly productive. We had a fresh zucchini every day, we had herbs for all occasions, we had plenty of peppers (though our jalapenos were disappointingly mild), and then came the tomatoes… buckets of them. We had four tomato plants that must have produced near fifty pounds of fruit by the end of the season. We put them in everything, we gave them away, and we let the kids eat them off the vine whenever they wanted, and we still couldn’t keep up. I’m more of a tomato nut than my wife is, but that harvest caught her attention to the possibility of growing our own food.
She still didn’t talk much about gardening, but in February of this year, she came to me with a drawing. It showed four more planters and her plans for the crops she would grow in each one. She had not just been dreaming, she had been researching; the corn and the beans would be on the northeast corner so the tall plants don’t shade the rest of the garden, the melons would be against the wall where it gets the hottest (because ‘we’ know they like the heat and we are just not sure if they can handle our cooler coastal climes), and we are going to put flowers at the end of each planter because the internets say the bright colors attract the bees to pollinate the fruit-bearing plants… and it makes things pretty. She had the planting schedules figured out (most of them are based on the date of the last seasonal frost of the year, which is a little tricky for Coastal Californians, because our last real frost was probably in 2009) but we figured it out more or less based off of what people are probably doing in states with real weather… and by asking my folks.
I was delighted. I built her the four new planters, I set up the irrigation, and I prepped the soil, but the rest of the project is hers. I’ll pull a weed here and there, and I did put a couple of plants in the ground for her while she simultaneously directed me and fed our 3-week old son, but this 
garden belongs to my wife. It looks like we will have a fruitful summer, and she’s already got plans for the winter garden – beets for borscht, turnips, artichokes for my son (never met a five-year-old who likes artichokes the way he does), and even some kale for the millennials.
Years ago I had a boss from West Virginia. Leo and I were talking one day, and he mentioned how he had hated gardening/farming when he was a kid. That was back before welfare, and West Virginians were poor. The only way they ate was with beans and corn from the garden. He got himself a fancy, high-paying job with a company in Detroit, far from the West Virginia hills, and he was happy to never have to tend a crop again. Well, come a few years later, he was married and bought a house with a yard. It was just a small yard, but he caught himself thinking about how he could plant some corn over there and beans over here, and before he knew it, he was eating out of his own garden, and nobody had forced him to do any of it. Then he and his family needed a bigger house, and what he wanted was a bigger yard for a bigger garden.
I laughed. Like you, I had been put to work in the yard in various capacities as a boy, and my father, of course, told me how easy I had it. Weeding the lawn? That was nothing. His father, my grandfather, had always had extensive gardens, not only for vegetables, but flower gardens. And worst of all were the roses. My grandfather had created some new variety of rose at one point. But he had at least four flower beds in the front and side yards and three or four more beds in the backyard, many of which had roses. (Then there was the vegetable garden and compost pile out in back of the garage.) My grandfather was a hard man. He was a competitive man. There could be no lollygagging for a boy raised by him. With how my father had grown up, he had no love for roses. So, when I heard Leo’s story, I laughed and said, “If my father ever starts planting roses, I’ll know he has succumbed to nostalgia.”
A couple of weeks later, it was spring in Missouri, if not yet here in Detroit. I was speaking with my father on the phone, and he mentioned he had been developing his garden a bit.
“I have a place here near the house,” he said, “and I thought that it was just perfect for roses. I went out and got several bushes…”
I had to explain why I was laughing so hard.
“I have a place here near the house,” he said, “and I thought that it was just perfect for roses. I went out and got several bushes…”
As the Bible puts it “train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it”
@arahant Brilliant!
I think some of it has to do with whose terms you’re working on. Gardening for someone else is not fun and not very rewarding, but you learn a skill. Then, when you have an opportunity that you yourself are master of, you have a skill and it just seems silly to not call it up and put it into action. Lo and behold, the rewards are deep and real! No all of a sudden you’re appreciating something you formerly disliked, and maybe even loathed. I think I’ve experienced this tendency with working for other folks vs. working for myself in a quite a few arenas.
With all the genetic manipulation behind modern consumer plants, why have thorns not been eliminated yet?
And why the heck does everyone plant roses near doors, driveways, and walking paths?
They’re pretty, but they’re not that pretty.
At least in towns I know, fruit trees seem to be among the most temperamental plants to grow. It’s not always clear why one fruits and another doesn’t, why one attracts pests and another doesn’t, if it’s getting too little sun or too much water, whether it’s birds or neighborhood kids picking it bare. Healthy fruit trees are fantastic. But they might not be best for new gardeners to start with.
Two things limited my interest in gardening as a kid: weeding and thorns. In the coastal South, weeding means camping in a cloud of mosquitoes with 90% humidity through long summer days. A week after you rip the weeds up by the roots, more have started to grow. So it feels like a losing battle. And blackberry vines found their way into everything… including my gloves. Then there were the roses, the barberry bushes, and the holly.
But there are few simple joys in life better than sitting on a back porch or patio while admiring a nicely kept garden.
But they smell so nice when you walk by or approach the front door. And there’s usually sun facing a front door.
Good reasons. It also means they are constantly sticking people if not kept well trimmed.
I often see them by mailboxes too, as if to ward off junk mail and bills.
Doesn’t matter where they plant ’em, they’ll get you.
What a fun process of making a home more homely.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under the May 2019 Group Writing Theme: Blooming Ideas. Do stop by and sign up!
I love this! We’re trying our hands at a garden for the third summer in a row. Please God I hope we at least get one tomato out of it.
Gardening is so addicting…when you first eat some tomatoes that you grew, and realize the pay off for your work, is a great moment! I’m glad your wife has become enchanted with the feel of the soil and reward of the fruits!