Growing Stuff

Looking out my bedroom window, I can see the snow disappearing from Peavine Mountain. Soon it’ll be time for planting, I think to myself. And this year we might actually make a garden.

We haven’t tried gardening since 1999, which my kids might remember fondly as the Year of the Large Spherical Objects That Took Over the Backyard. My kids love to grow things, and so do I. But the commitment. For the past three years, they’d ask me for a garden. I said I’d think about it. And I did think about it, on and off during April and May. I’d think about it all the way into June, when it’s really too late. Then I’d merely drool over the tomato plants of others, hoping my garden-minded friends would share.

Two of my five kids are adults now, and there’s talk of leaving home. I wrote the following reminder to myself in the fall of 1999. It was supposed to help me recall why the whole dirt-digging thing is worth all that time and effort.

I fondle my pumpkins every day. I take the hose out to the garden and plop it down near the giant plant’s connection with the earth, somewhere in the middle of a mass of vines with a diameter of about 20 feet. Every few days, I rotate my big babies—just about 20 or 30 degrees this way or that—careful not to break the big, sturdy stems. Just a few months ago, the monster plant was a seedling, the last of the jack o’ lanterns in 98 cent green plastic planters.

Jesse, 9, wants a garden. We haven’t had a garden since he was a seedling in kindergarten. I work. The kids have school, sports, music lessons, scouts and church stuff. We’ve been busy.

But lately, it’s starting to look like my five kids are outgrowing me. So I’ve been trying to think up things that they’ll still do with me—at least the three younger ones. It’s kind of a last-ditch effort before they all empty right out of my nest. So one weekend in May, we dug out the weedy corner that we hadn’t called a garden for three or four years. It took most of a Saturday and all of a Sunday afternoon. Tabitha, 13, and Stephanie, 11, pitched in with a fork and shovel. Finally, sweating like cans of icy cold sodas in the sun, we hit ShopKo for some topsoil, manure and plants.

The jack o’ lantern was just something I threw in the cart for fun. I would have bought two or three, so that we could grow enough pumpkins for the family. But there was only one pumpkin plant left on the picked-over shelves.

I bought three hardy-looking tomato plants—two Early Girls and one of some other variety that I can’t remember. I bought a six-pack of bell peppers, thinking who the heck needs this many peppers. I picked at my dirty fingernails in the humid tent, wondering if anything would live. I counseled a new gardener about the many uses of spaghetti squash. Me, a desk jockey who hadn’t gardened for years, giving advice. Too funny. On the way out of the tent, I spotted the pumpkin plant and one lone cucumber misplaced in a mess of string beans. I love fresh cuke salads. And who knows, I thought. Maybe the kids’ll get a pumpkin to carve out of the deal.

We planted. We watered. Jesse weeded the garden for a few weeks, then quit, as much from a loss of interest as from the coup d’garden by our pumpkin plant. The cucumber wilted, hung on for a few weeks at almost-dead status, then gave up completely. We mourned the loss.

But the pumpkin. What a plant. It climbed over the privet hedges and into the petunias. It escaped out over a low fence and onto the lawn where it sent forth flowers that became a couple of small pumpkins. More pumpkins lodged themselves next to flowerpots and at the edge of a huge pile that I could call compost if I removed the rotting lumber and a few grubby plastic Legos.

My life has always been a little out of control.

Our family mutt Mystie loved the pumpkins like they were her own. Before we instructed her not to mess with our produce, she decided the green globes would make great soccer balls, her favorite toy. She thinned the crop. Now our surviving group of five good-sized pumpkins—one per kid!—each sport some custom paw marks. I figure that’ll give ’em character when carving for Halloween. The scratches could be whiskers or wrinkles on some wizened old jack o’ dude.

The kids love the garden, even my two older teens, Dan and Eric. They don’t especially like the fresh tomatoes. And the growth of nearly two dozen green bell peppers doesn’t do much for them either. But they like showing our pumpkin plant off to visiting friends, who also marvel at these large spheres magically erupting out of massive green leaves in our very own backyard.

Yeah, the garden takes some work. I could’ve probably locked myself in my room, pulled the blinds on the sliding door that opens out into my backyard, and read books or watched movies. But when my kids start psychotherapy in their 20s, I fully expect they’ll come to me complaining that I rarely took them to Lake Tahoe and didn’t read them bedtime stories often enough.

“You were always working,” they’ll say.

That’s OK. Now I have some ammo.

“Remember growing pumpkins?”

I’ll drag out the pictures to prove my point. By then, my kids will be gone. I guess then I’ll have plenty of time to read books and no need to lock my bedroom door. I’ll have time to garden, but no one to help me dig.