Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "garden"
Led down the garden path -- and glad
When I was growing up, my family never had vegetable gardens, because my mother was unlikely to serve a vegetable that didn’t come from a can. In all fairness, it was the era: In the 1960s and 1970s, food was supposed to come from cans and boxes, unless it was a frozen TV dinner, in which case it was supposed to come from a tin tray. Also, my mother enjoyed her calories most when they came from chocolate and scotch.
I’m honestly not sure I ever ate a pea that hadn’t come from a can until my girlfriend’s mother had me shell a bunch one summer afternoon when I was 18 years old, and staying with that family while working as a dishwasher at a restaurant near their home in New Hampshire. A few years later that woman would become my mother-in-law, and she always took great pride in the way she taught me to eat my vegetables. (At least most of my vegetables. She never convinced me there was any reason why Swiss chard should be granted space on my plate.)
Yet one of my favorite times of the year these days is that weekend in May when my wife and I plant our vegetable garden here in Vermont. The process for me is alive with Proustian associations that have everything to do with people in my life and almost nothing to do with the kinds of tomatoes we’ve chosen to plant or the varieties of lettuce we’ve selected.
For example, there is the section of grass beside the garden where, two decades ago, my wife and I placed our seven-month-old daughter, Grace, in a blue canvas rocker, and she watched us and cooed as we worked. We were planting peas, and I always associate the rows in that section of the garden with our infant daughter’s wide eyes and the way she seemed so happy in the May sunshine.
There is the corner of the garden where Clark Atkins – who had to be in his mid-seventies at the time – backed up his pickup truck, angled a few sturdy planks from the rear of the truck onto the grass, and carefully walked his rototiller down them and into the yard. Clark was the first person to till the soil after we moved from Brooklyn to Vermont. This was a quarter of a century ago now.
And while we no longer have rhubarb behind our house, we did once, and I know right where it was – and often recall Lida Cloe when I walk near the patch, because it was Lida who showed us how delicious rhubarb was when served with strawberry preserves and vanilla ice cream.
My wife and I take the process of planting our garden very seriously, but we’ve done it so many times now that we are very efficient. What took a weekend twenty years ago now takes a day. We rarely bother with grids and maps, because even though we rotate our crops, we still know right where everything is going to emerge. The carrots and the beets. The different kinds of peppers. The basil, the parsley, and the cilantro.
My mother, when she would visit us in Vermont, was utterly baffled when she would survey the garden. One August afternoon when she was with us, I pulled a carrot from the ground and offered to run it under the hose so she could enjoy it that very moment. “Unless that hose sprays chocolate sauce, I’m okay,” she said – though in all fairness she did eat most of her salad that night. The reality is that my mother opened her cans of vegetables with love.
In any case, it’s easy for my mind to meander as I garden, and invariably my associations involve family and friends: People I’ve learned from and people I’ve loved. I think that’s true for most gardeners, because gardening is about food. As a character in one of my novels observed some years ago, “Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially – romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memories.”
Indeed. And that’s probably true whether the peas come from a can or a farm stand or a garden in your backyard.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 25, 2014. Chris’s new novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives on July 8. There are 18 appearances on the book tour:
http://www.chrisbohjalian.com/events
I’m honestly not sure I ever ate a pea that hadn’t come from a can until my girlfriend’s mother had me shell a bunch one summer afternoon when I was 18 years old, and staying with that family while working as a dishwasher at a restaurant near their home in New Hampshire. A few years later that woman would become my mother-in-law, and she always took great pride in the way she taught me to eat my vegetables. (At least most of my vegetables. She never convinced me there was any reason why Swiss chard should be granted space on my plate.)
Yet one of my favorite times of the year these days is that weekend in May when my wife and I plant our vegetable garden here in Vermont. The process for me is alive with Proustian associations that have everything to do with people in my life and almost nothing to do with the kinds of tomatoes we’ve chosen to plant or the varieties of lettuce we’ve selected.
For example, there is the section of grass beside the garden where, two decades ago, my wife and I placed our seven-month-old daughter, Grace, in a blue canvas rocker, and she watched us and cooed as we worked. We were planting peas, and I always associate the rows in that section of the garden with our infant daughter’s wide eyes and the way she seemed so happy in the May sunshine.
There is the corner of the garden where Clark Atkins – who had to be in his mid-seventies at the time – backed up his pickup truck, angled a few sturdy planks from the rear of the truck onto the grass, and carefully walked his rototiller down them and into the yard. Clark was the first person to till the soil after we moved from Brooklyn to Vermont. This was a quarter of a century ago now.
And while we no longer have rhubarb behind our house, we did once, and I know right where it was – and often recall Lida Cloe when I walk near the patch, because it was Lida who showed us how delicious rhubarb was when served with strawberry preserves and vanilla ice cream.
My wife and I take the process of planting our garden very seriously, but we’ve done it so many times now that we are very efficient. What took a weekend twenty years ago now takes a day. We rarely bother with grids and maps, because even though we rotate our crops, we still know right where everything is going to emerge. The carrots and the beets. The different kinds of peppers. The basil, the parsley, and the cilantro.
My mother, when she would visit us in Vermont, was utterly baffled when she would survey the garden. One August afternoon when she was with us, I pulled a carrot from the ground and offered to run it under the hose so she could enjoy it that very moment. “Unless that hose sprays chocolate sauce, I’m okay,” she said – though in all fairness she did eat most of her salad that night. The reality is that my mother opened her cans of vegetables with love.
In any case, it’s easy for my mind to meander as I garden, and invariably my associations involve family and friends: People I’ve learned from and people I’ve loved. I think that’s true for most gardeners, because gardening is about food. As a character in one of my novels observed some years ago, “Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially – romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memories.”
Indeed. And that’s probably true whether the peas come from a can or a farm stand or a garden in your backyard.
* * *
This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 25, 2014. Chris’s new novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives on July 8. There are 18 appearances on the book tour:
http://www.chrisbohjalian.com/events
A vegetable garden? Food for the soul.
Why garden?
Note the verb. In your mind’s eye, conjure a backyard vegetable plot. Imagine activity and effort. Visualize stooping. Lifting. Tilling. Seeding. Planting. Watering. Weeding. Thinning. (I abhor thinning. I haven’t the heart to rip from the soil the small, fragile leaves that will become lettuce or carrots or beets.) There are more — many more — words that buttress that single verb, “garden,” but you see my point. There is a lot of work before you get to harvesting. Savoring. And (yes) eating.
Moreover, I imagine if I added up the costs of my wife’s and my vegetable garden, it would not be a profitable venture. The rototilling, seeds, manure, pots, tomato cages, fertilizer, and hay alone might cost more than if we had bought the same vegetables at a farm stand or grocery store between July and October. But even if that’s not the case, when you factor in the hours and hours of our labor, our vegetable garden can’t possibly make fiscal sense.
And yet neither of us can imagine a summer without it. The same, I am sure, goes for all of our neighbors in the center of Lincoln. Most of us have vegetable gardens, and many of us have some combination of blueberries and strawberries and raspberries, too.
The irony in my case is that I grew up loathing all vegetables except petit peas from a can and corn on the cob. I’m not sure I ever ate fresh vegetables other than corn until the summer I was 18 years old, when the woman who would become my mother-in-law taught me that peas didn’t actually come from a can.
Consequently, I had never gardened (there again is that verb) until my wife and I moved to Vermont in our early twenties. My wife did not have to drag me into the effort kicking and screaming, but I remember watching our neighbor Clark Atkins — who had to have been well into his seventies by then — as he used wooden planks to walk a pretty serious rototiller off the back of his pickup, and thinking how I might have seriously underestimated how much work this garden might be.
But I have never regretted it. I know my wife feels the same way. Gardening is much like biking for me. My mind wanders and I find myself solving problems. Think of that great expression, “the shower principle.” I first heard the term from the fictional Jack Donaghy on the now defunct sit-com, “30 Rock.” How does Donaghy define it? “The shower principle is a term scientists use to describe moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the problem at hand — for example, when you’re showering,” Donaghy explains. I have certainly corrected flaws in whatever book I am writing while gardening, and understood some of my characters a little bit better.
Moreover, I wouldn’t say I approach gardening with a Zen-like serenity, but only because I approach nothing with a Zen-like serenity. Still, I grow a little calmer than usual in the garden, I become a little less intense. I take an almost parental pleasure in nurturing the plants as they grow, and the work is never a chore.
And I know that I enjoy the garden most in the first half of the summer, before the lettuce has gone to seed and the first cherry tomatoes are ready to pop into my mouth. After all, by August, despite our ministrations and care, the garden will start to look a little ragged and unkempt. By late September, when we are pulling the last of the carrots and the beets from the soil, it will look downright terrifying. The tomato plants will be dangling from the cages like the tentacles of dead man o’ war jellyfish on the beach.
But then we will put the garden to bed for the winter and allow it join a world that all around it is growing quiescent. The parallels with our lives are, for better or worse, inescapable.
So why do we garden? Because it connects us to that very world and reminds us on some level that we are a part of it. Because it feeds our soul as well as our stomach. Because, pure and simple, it makes us happy.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 17. The paperback of Chris's most recent novel, "Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands," arrives on Tuesday, May 26.)
Note the verb. In your mind’s eye, conjure a backyard vegetable plot. Imagine activity and effort. Visualize stooping. Lifting. Tilling. Seeding. Planting. Watering. Weeding. Thinning. (I abhor thinning. I haven’t the heart to rip from the soil the small, fragile leaves that will become lettuce or carrots or beets.) There are more — many more — words that buttress that single verb, “garden,” but you see my point. There is a lot of work before you get to harvesting. Savoring. And (yes) eating.
Moreover, I imagine if I added up the costs of my wife’s and my vegetable garden, it would not be a profitable venture. The rototilling, seeds, manure, pots, tomato cages, fertilizer, and hay alone might cost more than if we had bought the same vegetables at a farm stand or grocery store between July and October. But even if that’s not the case, when you factor in the hours and hours of our labor, our vegetable garden can’t possibly make fiscal sense.
And yet neither of us can imagine a summer without it. The same, I am sure, goes for all of our neighbors in the center of Lincoln. Most of us have vegetable gardens, and many of us have some combination of blueberries and strawberries and raspberries, too.
The irony in my case is that I grew up loathing all vegetables except petit peas from a can and corn on the cob. I’m not sure I ever ate fresh vegetables other than corn until the summer I was 18 years old, when the woman who would become my mother-in-law taught me that peas didn’t actually come from a can.
Consequently, I had never gardened (there again is that verb) until my wife and I moved to Vermont in our early twenties. My wife did not have to drag me into the effort kicking and screaming, but I remember watching our neighbor Clark Atkins — who had to have been well into his seventies by then — as he used wooden planks to walk a pretty serious rototiller off the back of his pickup, and thinking how I might have seriously underestimated how much work this garden might be.
But I have never regretted it. I know my wife feels the same way. Gardening is much like biking for me. My mind wanders and I find myself solving problems. Think of that great expression, “the shower principle.” I first heard the term from the fictional Jack Donaghy on the now defunct sit-com, “30 Rock.” How does Donaghy define it? “The shower principle is a term scientists use to describe moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the problem at hand — for example, when you’re showering,” Donaghy explains. I have certainly corrected flaws in whatever book I am writing while gardening, and understood some of my characters a little bit better.
Moreover, I wouldn’t say I approach gardening with a Zen-like serenity, but only because I approach nothing with a Zen-like serenity. Still, I grow a little calmer than usual in the garden, I become a little less intense. I take an almost parental pleasure in nurturing the plants as they grow, and the work is never a chore.
And I know that I enjoy the garden most in the first half of the summer, before the lettuce has gone to seed and the first cherry tomatoes are ready to pop into my mouth. After all, by August, despite our ministrations and care, the garden will start to look a little ragged and unkempt. By late September, when we are pulling the last of the carrots and the beets from the soil, it will look downright terrifying. The tomato plants will be dangling from the cages like the tentacles of dead man o’ war jellyfish on the beach.
But then we will put the garden to bed for the winter and allow it join a world that all around it is growing quiescent. The parallels with our lives are, for better or worse, inescapable.
So why do we garden? Because it connects us to that very world and reminds us on some level that we are a part of it. Because it feeds our soul as well as our stomach. Because, pure and simple, it makes us happy.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 17. The paperback of Chris's most recent novel, "Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands," arrives on Tuesday, May 26.)
