By Alysa Leier
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row.” For me it’s more like: with lots of sweat and blisters and dirt, and words you don’t need to know.
Oh, gardening. What a love/hate relationship I have with it. I love the fresh produce, but boy do I ever dislike the work that goes into our garden. It wasn’t even my idea to put in a garden, but I like to whine about doing all the work (I do honestly do most of it). It’s not that I’m afraid of a little bit of hard work; it’s that I don’t have the slightest tint of green in my thumb. More like brown. Every single year it ends up that I’ve miscalculated somewhere or misaligned something so some things die (actually, lots of things die), some things don’t grow very well, and then some things grow really well but don’t produce anything but leaves! Every. Single. Year. You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results? It’s literally the definition of insanity. That’s what gardening does to me, makes me go crazy.
You see, we plant everything from seeds. Everything. We start in early spring (or late winter as it usually is in North Dakota) in a greenhouse made from 2x4s, plywood, and heavy-duty plastic, topped with UV lights. We plant 2-3 seeds (a variety of tomatoes, peppers, melons, pumpkins, gourds, cucumbers, and other random things we decide to “try and grow” each year) in each of 288 starting medium disks that we “fluff up” with water. It’s all very technical here you see, wink-wink. That’s the easy part. Planting is easy, too. The weeding is where I begin to hate gardening. Especially when I, inevitably, let it go too long. Side note: wouldn’t it be just so awesome if we could all be as resilient as a weed? Though I must say, weeding is a bit of a stress reliever: grumble about something, pull a weed, grumble about something else, pull another weed, etc. For 2 months straight, I weed. Then finally, blessedly, in late July we see the first fruits of our labor. Literally and figuratively.
I know I should be grateful we have enough space to grow a huge garden and I can feed my kids “fresh-from-the-garden” produce, but then I remember we grow so much food that canning/preserving the extras is an absolute necessity to prevent a bunch of waste. But that’s a completely different can of worms for me.