I decided this summer I would learn to grow things. This may sound funny, but I am pretty much a plant killer, especially outside plants. My mother was known for her gardening. Our yard was always lined with gorgeous color: yellow lilies, red-orange poppies, white and dark green lily of the valley, purple periwinkle. And then there were the roses! Brilliant reds, gentle pinks, and velvety peach blossoms smelled as delicious as they looked. The Columbus Dispatch even came to our house one summer to write a story about her gardens. And though many people thought of her for her roses, her favorite flowers were her daffodils. Our house sat on a hill, and the woodsy hillside was filled with daffodils for a good month each spring. According to the American Daffodil Society, there are over 25,000 registered hybrids of daffodils, and my sister estimates that our mother had well over 100 varieties in our yard. Mom once explained to me that I was almost named after one of her favorites: Charity. Hearing this was the first time I recall being grateful for the name she had selected. Charity? Never again would I wish my mother hadn’t named me after a favorite bird. Nope. Not even the Sunday my daughter was baptized, and my minister sang the phoebe bird’s song out loud in church. Charity? Oh. my. goodness.
I was child #5. It’s clearly hard to come up with good names by the time you get to #5. However, it certainly set me up for life: Not the gardener here. No flowering name, no flowering expertise. My mother loved to spend time in her garden and I’m fairly certain it had something to do with the solitude of the activity. She did, after all, have five children. Gardening provided her solace, a respite from the craziness of mothering five children. For my mother, gardening was not designed to be a group activity. So I grew up loving but not planting a garden.
My husband is from a farming family. His grandfather owned a farm on the Ohio River. His father taught Agricultural Economics at The Ohio State University. My husband spends five minutes in the garden and by the time he walks back into the house, there are blossoms popping up everywhere. Across the years, his garden has supplied us with fresh zucchini, orange, yellow and red tomatoes, string beans, snow peas, cantaloupe, broccoli, cauliflower, corn, leeks, and carrots. Wherever we have lived, our neighbors have asked my husband for advice on anything garden: his thick green grass, the always-blooming old fashioned roses, our trees that triple in size in one spring. I learned early in our marriage not to mess with his yard, though I did try to plant bulbs once. Did you know that bulbs have a top and bottom? I did not. How I missed this with a mother famous for her daffodils is something my husband still ponders. Then there was the incident with the lawnmower. We were moving out of state and my husband had begun working in Michigan, while I stayed behind to sell our home. What a great surprise, I thought, if he came home for the weekend and the lawn was already cut! I can only say it was one of those miracle moments that my neighbor stopped by to ask how things were going just before I poured the gasoline into the hole where the oil goes.
But I’m older now and so much wiser. I could learn. I could. So I asked my husband, who is also older and much wiser, to teach me. “What about the rabbits?” he asked. “How about making a planter box, high enough to keep the rabbits out?” I asked back. And so he did. He made a beautifully high planter box, stained it and set its legs deep into the soil. Then he filled it with lovely dirt, dirt that will grow delicious veggies even if the gardener is named after a bird instead of a flower. Then he took me to the plant store where he taught me what will grow in the space we have. And then I planted the cabbages, the lettuces, the spinach, the basil, the carrots, the chives, the thyme and the sage all by myself. For Mother’s Day, he bought me a sprinkler attachment for our hose. How fun is that?! So I watered and waited and talked to my plants, just like Toad. (If you are not familiar with this gardening advice, I strongly encourage you read Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel. I found the chapter titled, The Garden, quite helpful.)
And there it is. This beautiful cabbage. My first cabbage. Ever. Who knew a cabbage could be so beautiful? What do you think? Should I call up the Dispatch?
from the Bellfry 