Toiling in the garden all summer can bring aches and pains, but gardening also produces rewards that money can’t buy
When we built our house several decades ago, the echo of pounding in the last nail hadn’t yet died away when we turned our attention to the garden plot out back.
It didn’t look like a garden plot. The dirt near the house was packed so hard by trucks delivering concrete that for days of using the tiller, my husband could only scratch the surface. He was elated whenever the tiller managed to kick up a few clods.
As I watched him out the kitchen window, I couldn’t be sure if he was digging any deeper or just wearing down the tiller tines.
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Out back there were piles of rubble to be moved and heaps of backfilling to be smoothed and yards and yards of topsoil to be carried in and unloaded and spread around and tilled.
After days of backbreaking work, we planted our first garden. It was no prize winner, but it kept our shoestring budget from snapping in two — tomatoes to can, cucumbers and beets to pickle, peas and beans and corn to freeze, carrots and potatoes and onions for winter use.
Dollars didn’t grow on trees, but they might in a backyard garden, as our small boys learned when they got wind of the “hortie” competition at the local fair.
Rules were as follows: “Enter the model contest, making either a bird, an animal, or a person, using any combination of local fruit, flowers, vegetables, leaves, roots or shrub branches. First prize a silver dollar!”
I toted some ingenious masterpieces to be entered in the above category. I am proud to say I am the first mother whose son’s entry, the celebrated jumping frog, leaped right up into the court of honour. He made the frog out of cucumbers, and on awards night, there it sat, a big green frog perched on a rock against a velvet backdrop. Surrounded by elegant prize blooms of every description, it was a very arresting sight.
The following year he entered a monster mosquito, no doubt inspired by the many at large. The proboscis on the mosquito was the long pointed end of a slender carrot. The judges got the point and slapped on a first prize ribbon.
Such honours were not easily forthcoming. The frog, for instance, kept losing a hind leg, so I took along spare cucumbers as replacement parts. I had to guard the proboscis on the mosquito in case it snapped off and ruined the whole idea.
Not to be outdone by his older brother, our youngest fellow dreamed up a lady made of rhubarb stalks, her head being a green tomato that sported a zinnia hat and her skirt formed by the rhubarb leaves. We dubbed her Rhubarb Rosie and she proved to be quite a celebrity even before she made her debut at the horticultural fair.
I put her in the back seat of the car and cautioned her young escort to treat her as a gentleman should. Before long, however, he was entertaining passing motorists by holding her up for their approval.
Then it happened. Her head fell off and she lost a green pea eye. In the excitement that followed, somebody squashed the pea and such wails arose from the back seat that I was forced to the curb to restore order. No, I didn’t have any peas in my purse. Yes, we would drive home for a pod. No, we won’t be late. Yes, I’m sure she will win a prize.
And so, five miles and 10 minutes later, Rhubarb Rosie arrived intact at the horticultural fair. Having undergone a makeover, she was not much to look at, but she was the prize of one small boy, age six. The judges thought so too.
About this time, we realized we were not only growing vegetables, but raising future gardeners. As long as we felt that way, it was always too soon to quit.
The world is dotted with little squares that pass for backyard gardens, and hovering somewhere in the vicinity of each plot can be found a human being who more closely resembles a scarecrow. Wearing an old straw hat, baggy shirt, muddy pants and gardening gloves, we are either squinting at the sky for signs of rain or grumbling about the blistering heat.
To let us tell it, the weather is always too dry or too cold or too wet or too windy to grow a good garden, but do we ever give up? No, because complaining about the weather and the bugs and the hail and the drought are as much a part of gardening as digging and planting and sowing and reaping.
We cope as best we can. Like the little ditty says, “whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not, whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot, we’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.”
A crooked old sign at a roadside stand said it all: Veggetubbles, Home Groan.
What that producer evidently lacked in spelling skills he made up for with gardening abilities. The rickety old shelves under his sign sagged beneath the weight of bright red tomatoes, glossy green cucumbers and white heads of cauliflower, to name a few. When he used his gnarled fingers to make change, I noticed quite a wad of money jammed into his billfold.
I suspect, however, that he got far more satisfaction out of snapping the string beans from their stems or trimming the cabbage heads or pulling out the long orange carrots.
Those are the rewards of gardening that money can’t buy.
