On Walnut Ridge

Spring has come early to Tennessee. Winter was ambivalent this year, barely showing up, an unfortunate portent to a wicked summer. I spent the day weeding:  the peony bed, the perennial bed, and then the garden beds.  It’s the best kind of work, weeding. Mindless and repetitive, it leaves the imagination free to meander all sorts of places. While digging up crabgrass and dandelions in the peony bed, I was planning my summer adventures; perhaps a week at the beach with the family, maybe a writing workshop, or a fly fishing expedition with Tim at the White River in Arkansas. Luckily, I came out of my reverie just before whacking the tips off a little green furl of dinner plate dahlia poking its fingers up through the soil. Every Spring, the sight of green plants, wakened and stretching themselves toward the sun creates a small renewal in me. In that moment, the darkness of winter with its unrelenting grayness and its damp clammy chill vanishes. Like the peony and the dahlia, my hopeful heart is resurrected.

The appearance of green shoots and sprouting things, with their death defying acts of renewal, emboldens gardeners, both the novice and the expert. Each year I choose a new vegetable to plant, something I have never tasted before, convinced it will flourish. If the peony which I have completely neglected since cutting the last fat flower in September can reappear with such vigor, surely a vegetable that I lavish with attention all summer will thrive. This year’s pick is pineapple tomatillos. They are supposed to taste like just like a pineapple, and since my locavore tendencies preclude my buying pineapple at the grocery, I’ve got big hopes for this little veggie.

That furl of dahlia pushing its determined limbs up through the Tennessee clay reminds me to pay attention to things that are easily gotten, little bits of beauty around me that are either free or darn inexpensive. Things like the sounds of wind chimes floating around on the breeze, the smell of freshly turned earth, the wiggle-twist of earthworms doing their good garden labor, unpaid. The outrageous purple-ruby of the random redbud tree in the woods behind the garden makes me hungry for beauty everywhere. So I plant flowers in between the lettuces from seed heads that I pilfered while walking through the garden at the Biltmore Estate last fall: hollyhocks and strawflowers and black-eyed-susans.  I repaint the bedroom, plant petunias, and hang a glass globe from a shepherd’s crook in the garlic bed.

If Spring had a billboard it would read GO BIG FOR BEAUTY. Beauty is easily gotten if you aren’t focused on glamour. Forget about the plants in the seed catalogues. Yours won’t look like that anymore than you will look like the Victoria Secret model just because you cough up a small fortune for the underwear.  Your plants will look a bit more like you; slightly stooped and a bit ragged at the edges, but sturdy and useful. In a word, Beautiful.

Sprout

Everything has a beginning. Most things begin as a tiny something, hidden away, usually in the dark. An traveling egg encounters a rushing spermatozoa, a pea is buried beneath the soil, an idea is formed deep inside the brain late at night while its thinker lies, sleepless.

Things sprout. The pea sprouts a root that reaches down into the soil for water and leaves that reach up to the sun for energy. The embryo sprouts little buds of legs and arms. An idea sprouts into a thought, the thought into an intention, the intention into action.

Planting, tending, watching and nurturing are my jobs. As a psychotherapist, my job is to witness and nurture people’s emotional and relational growth. As a mother and grandmother, my job is to support, encourage and guide, but mostly to love fiercely and without waiver. As a gardener, my job is to plant, nurture and harvest in a way that is respectful of the soil, the plant, and the planet.

This quotation from Hal Borland cheers me as Christmastime ebbs away and the two dreary months of January and February loom unpleasantly on the horizon;

“There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.”

They began arriving on Monday. Burpee, Territorial, The Cook’s Garden, Johnny’s.  And there will be more. I take them to bed with a cup of hot tea and turn up the electric blanket, dreaming, imagining, planning for spring, wishing away the winter. I’d like to enjoy the winter more and perhaps if we had sunshine, or snow, and especially if we had sunshine and snow at the same time, I might. But here in Tennessee, winter is mostly dreary, or wet, and often dreary and wet concurrently.

So I dream of thing sprouting. I buy seeds, and fire up the grow lights, and make my plans. In a way, it is what we all do each morning. We fire up the grow lights and plan our day. Something is always sprouting, if not in the garden, at least in our imaginations. Especially in winter.

It’s late November and time to put the garden to bed. There are still lettuces and cabbages and other greens growing like mad in one of the raised beds, tucked snugly under a row cover to protect them from the early morning frosts that herald the coming winter. In another bed is a lovely stand of green peas, their vines curling tenaciously around the cane poles I staked along the borders to give them support. The pea vines are a lovely translucent green and the pods are full of peas that will never mature. The vines froze in the first hard frost, leaving the big, flat pods shimmering and glassy. Clearly in my late summer greediness for a second pea crop I miscalculated the timing of days to maturity and first autumn freeze. I’ll pull them up this weekend and throw them in the compost pile.  One of the blessings of a vegetable garden is that even mistakes can be turned into something useful.

Last weekend Tim and I mucked out the animal stalls and transferred the litter to the garden. We are doing a little experiment. Since we won’t plant again until Spring, we put the manure directly into the beds, with four of the garden beds getting goat manure, and the other four getting chicken litter. We are wondering which poop will be the best soil amendment. A deep pile of leaves goes on top of the manure and hay mix from the stalls, and then before planting, a couple of inches of compost. I realize I put more energy into making sure my garden beds are well nourished than I do taking care of my skin. I know women who layer creams and moisturizers and clarifiers on their faces every night with the same kind of intention that I put into feeding my garden soil. While both seem important, I find the effort expended in taking care of the garden more rewarding than trying to stop the effects of time on my face. I’ll be wrinkled but well fed, with a lined face and a nourished soul.

Growing your own food, at least a bit of it, changes your life. Even in the places all over the world where people must grow their own food or starve instead, that active engagement with the natural world outside their doorstep deepens their experience. When I walk the hills in rural Guatemala, and look at the tiny well-tended kitchen gardens of Mayan Indians who subsist on next to nothing, it is clear that those beans and corn and cilantro plants are part of their cultural and spiritual expression of all that is holy to them.

 In Barbara Brown Taylor’s lovely little book about faith, An Altar in the World, she writes, “To make bread, or make love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone.”