Bloom Where You are Planted
My first attempt at a vegetable garden was at my first house in Sunnyvale California. It was old and small, but it was in a quiet neighborhood, and it had a huge backyard. My neighbors behind me had a large loquat tree that hung over my back fence and I used to gather the fruit as it dropped on my side and make jam. Like so many young women at the time, I was a Martha Stewart wannabe. My back yard was mostly grass with some nice hardscape and shrubs that mostly took care of themselves. But one weekend I dug up a third of the lawn and over the next few weeks, planted a vegetable garden that was far too big for me to maintain, let alone eat the proceeds. Which was okay because due to the first problem, there wasn’t much of the second to be worried about. In short, it turned out, for the most part to be a very large native wild meadow!. READ THAT: WEEDS.
But I learned a lot from that first attempt and mostly failure. While the garden was new and I was still full of pride and hope I would come out every morning and check on the tiny seedlings that were popping up in neat rows, just exactly as I had planned.
Honestly, I was full of myself, and Martha had nothing on me. Until that one morning. If you plant seeds in your garden, you know the one I’m talking about. The March of the Snails. My garden was a vast sea of dark, fertile dirt. Good dirt to be sure. But just dirt, nonetheless. The thing about snails is that they don’t share. They don’t leave anything. When the birds that live in your neighborhood get hungry for a few berries, or when, in the dead of the summer, searching desperately for water, they puncture your biggest tomato, they don’t usually devour a whole crop unless there’s a swarm of them. (I have that story too, but for another time). But snails eat it all. Down to the dirt. So, what did I, a new gardener do? I put out snail bait and angrily planted more seeds. I was very lucky that my dog didn’t decide to eat the bait and have long since given up on using poisons and pesticides. I learned that getting angry doesn’t bother the snails at all. So, when a crop fails for whatever reason, you just try again. Calmly and with the certain gratitude that you can plant a garden at all. I share my garden with the critters and yes, even varmints that both live there and visit. And I ask them politely to share as well. Sometimes it works and sometimes not. But for the most part we live in happy harmony.
This rose was planted on the edge of my current garden, and I dutifully gave her a trellis to climb up and away from the gazebo which usually has shade cloth over it in summer. But after a long dark week of rain in late winter a couple of years ago, I came out to the garden to see she had decided to grow straight up from where she was planted and then climb where her footfalls took her up the gazebo to sprawl across the top. There will be no shade cloth on top of the gazebo now. The rose has decided.
I have been gardening for forty years since that first garden. It’s in my blood now. Over the last three years, I’ve had hip replacement surgery on both my hips. Luckily, my husband is as avid gardener as well. He does the flowers; I do the veggies. And in the future, I will show you the incredible sanctuary that he has stewarded. For none of us create a garden without the expert help of the garden itself. For a garden intends to grow.
Tom and I moved to Lincoln California from the San Francisco Bay Area five years ago. We loved the Bay Area. Lincoln took some adjusting to; mostly adjusting the very hot summers. But Lincoln is a beautiful, sunny location in the Sierra Foothills. We live on the edge of the town. Country roads flank our neighborhood. We have golf courses and wineries and lots of local farms where we can get whatever fresh produce we don’t grow. And just like the rose, we intend to bloom here, where we have planted ourselves.