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I have longed to have my own garden for a very long time. I have many Pinterest boards dedicated to planning out container gardens, gardens for small spaces, indoor gardens, tiny back porch gardens. On the back porch of my townhouse, I tried to grow a strawberry plant (bought from the farmer's market), which eventually withered away and died. A coworker gave me little ornamental pepper and basil plants that I managed to keep alive for a season before they died. Someone once bought me an orchid that was supposed to be foolproof to keep alive -- it died. A friend gave me a clipping of a succulent that didn't make it very long.
Though I kept killing things (or rather, letting them die), I still dreamed of having my own garden.
My mother had the greenest thumb I've ever seen. She could make anything grow. She could bring a plant on the brink of death back to life. At least it felt that way to me. Growing up, there were cacti growing on the kitchen window sill (before everyone called them 'succulents') and tropical plants growing in the east-facing dining room and the west-facing living room. Spider plants, mother-in-law's tongue, aloe, bamboo, money plants, jade plants, a Norfolk pine that served as our Christmas tree for at least a decade and then some. I have memories of her watering each plant with her long-neck watering can, needing to refill it several times during each watering session.
Outside, her high desert garden flourished. She converted an old pig sty that had been built on our property long before we'd moved there into a garden. Pumpkins and squash growing in the stalls, long rows of snap peas (I can still hear the tiny snip and crunch from pinching each snap pea off its stem). I remember delighting in beets, freshly dug out of the ground, their deep purple and sweet earthiness. After awhile, my parents expanded the garden so my mother could grow rows and rows of corn.
On top of that, my mother grew dozens, if not hundreds, of irises all along the foundation of the house. The front yard had a verdant flower bed and the backyard had what I remember to be a small pollinator garden.
I'm not sure I ever went out with my mother to tend the garden. I do remember what feels like whole days where my brothers and I were left to our own devices inside the house while my mom worked in the garden. This is where I learned to make lunch for myself and my brothers -- hot dogs, ramen, cans of soup, sandwiches. I used to eat spoonfuls of sweet corn right from the can.
Knowing what I know now about having a kid, though, maybe my mom just wanted to do something by herself for once.
Last year, I started my first raised bed garden. For the entire year prior, I planned the supplies I needed and what I wanted to grow. I bought seeds and starts from the company I remember my parents buying their seeds from. After Mother's Day weekend, my husband helped me fill the bed with raised bed garden soil, and I put in my tomato, basil, chives, mint, and lemon verbena starts. I sowed zucchini, yellow squash, watermelon radish, peas, cucumber and swiss chard seeds.
Despite all this planning, I remain a "chaos gardener," which I thought was just a term I'd made up for myself. Turns out it's an entire Facebook community of people.
I underestimate the amount of space each plant will take up in my garden bed. I had no idea zucchini and yellow squash plants grew so large, so that first year, eight to ten squash plants grew, crowded together and bursting out of my garden bed. No matter what I did, the radishes never grew. The swiss chard seedlings never grew past the microgreen stage.
What a chaos garden looks like.
The two cherry tomato plants I had grew all through the summer, right up until the first frost. I had little weird shaped cucumbers that tasted, shockingly, like cucumbers. I had basil and chives and mint for days. I had a surplus of zucchini and yellow squash, enough to give away and enough to try out a plethora of interesting recipes beyond zucchini bread.
Summer squash pizza, recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Honestly so good. Worth all the squeezing.
That summer, we went through long stretches of heat advisories and no rain. Squash bugs came for my squash plants, but zucchini continued to grow prolifically, somehow. (Don't ask me, I have no idea.) I was diligent about watering the garden nearly every day. Every morning when I watered the garden, most of the time with my daughter on my hip or standing next to me holding onto my pant leg, I talked to the plants and my mother. I asked the swiss chard what they needed, I asked my mom why these radishes weren't growing ("I read that radishes are supposed to be easy to grow! What the hell is going on with these?"). I marveled at finding new zucchini every other day, and my kid loved pulling tomatoes off the plants, ripe or not, and biting into them. ("Juicy!")
Whenever I brought in a harvest of those little tomatoes, I thought of one of the meals I made for my mother in the last months of her life. She, too, was growing a few tomato plants like mine, in flower pots in the backyard. Even as her health began to fail, her green thumb persisted. Her tomato plants were heavy with yellow, red, and orange fruits. One afternoon, I made her a caprese-ish salad with her tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, olive oil, salt, and pepper. "This is good," she said. "Something different."
A version of “Mom’s caprese salad,” made last summer with the tomatoes from my first chaos garden.
This year, my garden looks much different. I'm calling this year The Sophomore Slump. My zucchini and yellow squash plants have produced nothing but limp blossoms. I planted strawberry crowns and they are sending out runners. I have a couple sage plants, grown from seed. I have Italian parsley and chives for days. I have small basil plants growing from seed -- by frost, they may be big enough for me to harvest enough for a batch of pesto, maybe. The marigolds are growing beautifully and starting to bloom now -- right on schedule. I have a couple dill plants in a flowerpot on our back step that are growing tall. The lettuce is, startlingly, growing enough for me to use for tacos.
The Sophomore Slump Garden.
The garden doesn't have the bounty that it did last year. Maybe I needed to use more plant food and compost. Maybe I need to water more often. Maybe it's simply the heat -- I've read in some gardening groups that others have had similar issues with their zucchini this season. Maybe I just need to talk to the plants more.
Swiss chard seedlings, in limbo.
I do admit that I've spent less time and attention on my garden this summer than last. I've made plans to do black-eyed susan starts to plant in the front yard and haven't done it. I made mental notes to chelsea chop the native goldenrods and asters that have popped up in my backyard, and forgotten to do it (they are now taller than me). I've made plans to clear out an area of creeping charlie and sow bee balm and blanketflower in its place. Have I done it? Nope. I haven't even been able to do my regular poison ivy patrols.
My kid is an actual toddler with very real wants and needs and expresses them clearly (sometimes with words, a lot of times with tears and collapsing on the floor with them (we joke sometimes that she's got Italian footballer blood in her (we can say that because she does))). The struggle to find a balance between doing toddler-centered activities and my own is real. Sometimes, the toddler stuff wins out. A lot of times it does.
(Sure, could I involve my kid in some of these garden chores that have languished on my to-do list? I could try! The only item on that garden list that she might be even remotely interested in right now is pulling weeds. She also really wants to help me hand pull poison ivy, which...of course, she does.)
I've been trying to slow down this summer, which means consciously not trying to do *everything* every day. It means spending more time playing with my kid and filling her connection cup and leaving the bread making for another day. It means allowing myself to make the same meals again and again so I can use that time and creative energy to write instead. Sometimes, it means allowing myself to play Stardew Valley for awhile on my Switch during my "me" time rather than be "productive."
In doing this, I've come to the realization that my plate was piled with too much. The expectations I have for myself as a mother, a writer, and just a human being trying to save her sanity are far too high. I see now that there isn't room on my plate for everything. There are weeks where cooking and baking projects take priority over writing, and that's okay. There are weeks where my writing takes precedence over a baking project or squeezing in more time to read a book. There are weeks where vegging out and playing Stardew or watching Sherlock or Vanderpump Rules are all I have the energy for. There are weeks where my kid and I will spend lots of time outside and there will be weeks where we don't. There are weeks where the laundry gets done and there are weeks where the pile of laundry will remain unfolded in the crib. There's a balance, and it changes all the time. There are things that will get done, and there are things that will not.
It's also meant that because I've made writing a priority this summer, the garden gets less of my attention. I try not to feel guilty, like things are just falling off my plate without rhyme or reason. I remind myself that I'm actually pausing, looking at what's on my plate, and deciding what I want to keep today and what I want to save for later. I'm also deciding that some of what's on my plate doesn't actually need to be there at all.
I think back to my mom coming inside, finally, after hours of work in the garden, her big sun hat tied around her chin, her long-sleeved shirts and gloves to protect her skin. I wonder about what was on my mom's plate then, what were her tradeoffs. Time spent inside doing house chores for time out in the garden? Putting work into the garden out of economic necessity so we could have food to eat later? Letting my brothers and I take care of ourselves so she could get some peace and quiet in the garden?
The thing about gardening and growing plants is that it's an investment -- of time, energy, economic and material resources, patience. It takes time to see what will become of all your work. There is a lot of time to course correct, and sometimes course correcting means waiting for the next growing season to apply a new technique or new knowledge. Sometimes course correcting can mean ripping out a bunch of plants and starting all over again.
There are ebbs and flows to all of it. This year, my mental health and my writing are my top priority, rather than the garden. Next year, maybe the garden will flourish again with two years of gardening experience under my belt. Maybe this is just the year of...slowing down and figuring everything out. Life has been a bit of chaos since having a kid. Maybe this is just the season to say, "Time out -- stop. Let's rearrange everything and figure this out."
This year's lone zucchini.
Maybe I shouldn't think of this year as my garden's The Sophomore Slump. Just because it isn't bursting at the seams doesn't mean it's any less successful. In fact, now that I think of it -- I haven't let a single plant die this summer. The radishes never went anywhere, but everything else I've planted this season has remained alive. I have dill, chives, parsley, and sage to snip fresh for meals, I have beautiful flowering black-eyed susans, buddleia, lavender, salvia, and marigolds in the garden and the flower beds. I have a cute picture of my kid standing next to the peony I planted the first autumn we moved into this house. Just yesterday, I looked at my squash plants and found one small zucchini growing strong.
I've come a long way for a girl who used to let every plant she touched die. When I wasn't looking, I became someone who keeps things alive. I'm glad I've stopped for a minute to meet her.
The most important thing I’ve kept alive.
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