Mary, Mary, quite contrary...

~...quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

~I live surrounded by gardeners. My church is well known in the community for its garden, and working in that garden is a treasured activity for many. All long the road I live on you can see beautiful well-tended flower gardens. Many times conversations will drift to perennial beds and annuals and Latin names of plants. I am totally out of my element--I have no interest in gardening and no gardening skillz. I can (and do) manage houseplants successfully, and I can handle hanging baskets or a few flowers in a border, but for the most part I have no desire to dig in the dirt, no motivation to weed and prune and water and mulch. None.

~Because I love tomaotes so much I've tried to grow them a few times. My parents weren't gardeners, but my father and I managed to have a few good tomato plants one summer. My solo efforts have been less than stellar however-and really, what could be easier than growing a few tomatoes? One summer when I was living in Iceland I decided to try to grow tomatoes indoors. At a local greenhouse I bought several healthy tomoato plants, potted them up, put them in sunny windows in the laundry room, faithfully watered them and waited. Waited all summer long. And they got flowers but no tomatoes. I couldn't understand what had gone wrong with these very large and healthy looking plants--why no tomatoes? Finally someone asked me if I had pollinated them. Me? Um, no. It turns out that if you grow tomatoes inside where there are no bees, you have to pollinate them by hand. Who knew?

~There have been a couple of times in my life when I've wanted a garden--or thought I did. Ironically both times were summers when I was pregnant--maybe inspired by my own fertility, but maybe not the best time to take on ambitious projects that I know so little about. The first time we shared a community garden plot with some friends, one of whom was also pregnant. We optimistically planted a fairly large plot with a variety of vegetables, but as I recall, that garden we abandoned mid summer when it became clear that there was no way we were going to be able to keep up with the weeds.

~The second time was the summer I was pregnant with the Kid. When we moved into that house, there was a vegetable garden all planted and we reaped the benefits--which inspired us to try to recreate it the next spring. Here's what I remember about that garden. We planted several rows of peppers, but the pepper plants kept disappearing. They weren't chewed or knocked over--they were gone, leaving an empty hole behind. I could not figure out how those plants disappeared without a trace until I came out one morning and found a pepper plant pulled down half way into the ground--then it hit me. Moles were pulling the plants out from below, leaving nothing behind.

~We also planted several rows of corn, and we borrowed an old plow to keep the areas between the rows free of weeds. It was a lot of work pushing that plow and I generally avoided it, but one day I was really angry--very angry at my ex--I was so angry I wanted to throw things. Instead I went out and plowed the corn. It actually helped. But I don't remember getting any corn from that garden. As I recall it anyway, the whole garden was pretty much a failure. The zucchini grew like wildfire as zucchini does, but then got some sort of fungus and died. The tomatoes weren't very productive. The peppers disappeared and the corn --who knows? That was the end of my vegetable gardening.

~Perhaps this is another sign that I'm meant to live in a city :)