THE GARDEN!

I love our garden!

I love picking fresh tomatoes that taste nothing like those watery red things you buy in the stores. I love snipping sprigs of dill weed to sprinkle onto my breakfast eggs or a baked salted potato. I love watching the zuchetta* squash produce their foot-long fruits up the trellis or curl into a circle on the ground. Sometimes one gets lost in the abundant foliage and grows nearly as tall as I am.

What I don’t love so much anymore is the work a garden requires. Thankfully my husband is still up to it, and this year’s garden looks to outshine even the last.

My grandmother was an avid gardener, though the floral kind. She knew the names of all the flowers, both wild and cultivated, and insisted I learned them by heart. She showed me the difference between a weed and a sprout with nearly identical leaf patterns.

When I was in my twenties and living on a communal farm in British Columbia, I got my first taste of vegetable gardening. The group of us was intent to “live off the land” and might have done so had we been able to make beer and grow tobacco. Still, I learned a lot with those early attempts at food cultivation, things I could build on in the years to come.

For a time in the early seventies, I had a small mining claim in the California Desert, Imperial County. I lived there from November to May when it began to get hot. While there, I planted tomatoes, peppers, and sunflowers. When I moved back north, I brought one plant each with me. Those poor water-starved plants went crazy in the lush Pacific Northwest. The sunflower grew 15 feet tall!

Fast forward to the nineties when I bought an old house in southeast Portland. In a quiet inner-city neighborhood, it came with both a front and a back yard. The first year I did nothing but mow the grass and try to corral the jungle the previous owner had allowed to grow. The second year, we plowed up the front yard and planted vegies.

Now, as I sit by the window working on my laptop, I gaze out the window and enjoy seeing the passersby stop and stare over the garden fence. Yes, I’m proud of our work, and of that one little nudge toward self-sufficiency. Not only will there be fresh salads and sautés, we will be putting things away for the winter as well. Frozen tubs of tomatoes, dried herbs and plums, home-canned pickles and sauces will be put away for use through the seasons until next year’s garden brings its summer bounty once again.

BTW, we have bees, too!