On March 20, a cool, sunny Saturday, I decided to share my vision of the backyard with my wife as we sat sipping coffee in the living room. Specifically I said I wanted to try my hand at converting a small, fenced-off space near the back into a vegetable garden.
The mood in the room changed instantly.
She and I come from two distinctly different upbringings — myself an urbanite with one brother, she the sixth of 10 children born to a family in the County of Wetaskiwin. My mother briefly had a vegetable garden at some point in my early childhood — my distaste for radishes stems from one summer spent feasting on them when no one was watching. Kathy's hatred of gardening as a whole comes from spending the summer breaks of her formative years planting, watering, weeding and harvesting an almost half-acre plot on her family's land. Every time the word "garden" escaped her lips, it audibly dripped with venom, as if it was synonymous with other unpleasant activities like lifting heavy rocks or eating garbage.
I said I wanted to give it a try. She responded by activating the voice recorder on her iPhone and soliciting several promises from me with respect to what I would and would not do as I started my new hobby.
‘… I promise to finish what I start …'
When we moved into our duplex in May 2009, I had initially eyed the area in question as a potential garden. It is about three metres long by a metre and a half wide, nuzzled right against our back fence. Ringed with thick chicken wire, the previous tenants had used it as a dog pen.
Having removed all the small gifts left behind, I decided one day in July 2009 to start gardening. With the mercury tipping 30 C, I spent one hour digging up mounds of clay and weeds of every description before spending the rest of the day indoors with heat exhaustion.
This year I decided to do some actual research and learn about such important subjects as soil, compost, pH, frosts, soil temperature and so on. As soon as the snow melted, I spent what few hours I could spare, on my hands and knees in near-frozen soil, yanking every single weed I could find and clearing any foreign debris. Three weeks later I spent a cool morning spading and raking the soil. The next week I spent an odorous hour rooting around in my home-built composter for actual compost and mixed six two-gallon pails of it into the soil. The subsequent pH test revealed the soil was acidically perfect.
While most gardeners wait until the May long weekend to plant, I simply couldn't contain my enthusiasm. I dropped a small bundle on seeds at Hole's and spent another Saturday digging and planting. Not knowing what was difficult to grow and what wasn't, I decided to sow a little bit of almost everything — bush beans, snow peas, Yukon gold potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, garlic, cucumbers, corn and carrots. Over subsequent weeks, I added four pepper plants and two Roma tomato plants.
I had started. And as far as I understood, I was pretty much finished.
‘I remove Kathy from all gardening responsibilities …'
While she might not have performed any work in the garden, it turned out my wife was a literal treasure trove of information and knowledge. She shopped with me for supplies, helping pick out a spade and a rake. I was the only man I knew who got a hoe for Father's Day.
But she at least knew what was a weed and what wasn't. A stringy plant I proudly proclaimed a blossoming pea plant turned out to be a stinkweed. She influenced my decision to plant the peas, beans and cucumbers near the chicken wire fence so they could grow up.
Yet as summer came and the garden continued to grow, she became increasingly amazed with how well it was performing. By mid-July we were feasting on handfuls of snow peas. And by August, of her own free will and volition, Kathy was in the garden with me, plucking beans and peas from their blossoms.
‘You don't have to feel sorry for me when I get frustrated …'
"What frustrations could there possibly be?" I asked. "Plant seeds, water and wait, right?"
The first problem arose in May when, as the Rainmaker Rodeo organizers would like to forget, a howling blizzard descended on St. Albert, covering my beloved garden in almost a foot of snow. A conversation with some staff members at Hole's reassured me the snow would act as a giant source of moisture, protecting the seeds from the cold while watering them as it melted.
And then there were the thistles. They'd been problematic in the lawn the year before and they attacked the garden with a vengeance as spring progressed. Worse still, I learned you couldn't just yank them because their roots grew horizontally and very deep, meaning they'd just grow again in larger numbers. It was my mother-in-law who clued me in on her little secret — tear them in half and then use a medicine bottle and dropper filled with Round-up to kill them. It was a laborious task that required pinpoint precision lest I kill off the crops I was trying to save but by the end of July, I had finally turned back the tide.
Not everything, of course, grew, and waiting for what did grow to produce actual vegetables began to wear on my nerves. On more than one occasion I stood in front of my garden, sporting a tremendous sea of perfect green plants and asked out loud, "When do you become food?"
The first round of cucumber seeds never even sprouted and I replanted so late that they had just started to blossom when this week's frost killed them off. It took two rounds of beans, which I was told any idiot could grow, to produce anything. Of two sweet pepper plants, only one grew anything — three tiny green peppers while the other was content to spend its time sagging against its pole. One hot pepper plant produced dozens of fiery chilies while its twin just enjoyed basking in the sun and making useless flowers. The broccoli grew so quickly that it shaded the cauliflower, which barely grew and was slowly devoured by something I never identified. My tomatoes, for which I had grand plans for Italian cooking, were just starting to turn red when all the branches on both plants suddenly turned brown and the leaves died. And the corn, which grew to a towering 6-foot-2, produced cobs of pale white kernels fit only for pig slop … if I had pigs.
‘I will not choose gardening over time with Christopher …'
Instead I chose the opposite — spending gardening time with my three-year-old son. During the first weeks as I weeded and spaded what would be our garden, Christopher was right at my side, digging for worms, reassuring them everything was OK, then gently placing them back in the dirt. He helped me water, helped me weed and repeatedly dragged me outside to look at our garden, pointing at each young plant and asking again what it would become. But it was the towering corn that captivated his attention the most. Every visitor, regardless of whether or not they had seen it already, had to come and look at the corn.
He picked the raspberry bushes clean and snacked on snow peas. He declared a baby carrot I dug up and cleaned for him the "best carrot ever." Yet even though we grew them, he wouldn't touch the beans or the broccoli and had to be tricked into eating his potatoes.
In the end it was a pretty successful season for this gardening rookie. We've got potatoes, beans, broccoli and carrots to spare. But in what began as a solitary pursuit, I can't shake the feeling that I grew more than vegetables. Between the rows of bushy green tops and enormous leaves, my young family and I grew closer over something as simple as a bunch of seeds in the soil. Next year, I might need to plant a bigger garden.
