How Does Your Garden Grow?

“Corn, corn, nothing but corn.” In the movie Secondhand Lions, fourteen year old Walter Caldwell’s two eccentric uncles, Hub and Garth McCann, take up gardening. Garth buys vegetable seed packets from a traveling salesman and presses Hub and Walter into helping him with the garden plot. One day while hoeing the newly sprouted plants, Uncle Hub realizes they have been taken. All the seeds are the same-corn.

I come from a long line of gardeners. As a child, I spent many summer mornings picking peas, butterbeans, cucumbers, tomatoes, corn, green beans, okra, and onions. The middle of the day was for shelling, shucking, and peeling and the afternoon and evening were for canning and freezing the fruits of our labors.

We always had a big garden and helping wasn’t optional, but the home grown vegetables we enjoyed all year and the fresh ones on the table as long as they were in season were worth all the work. We rarely had to buy any at the store and when we did, they just weren’t the same.

We now have a garden spot in our back yard, a large rectangular plot with a low concrete block wall around it that the granddaughter uses as a balance beam. I have had dreams of a beautiful vegetable garden for the twenty plus years we’ve lived here, but, except for the occasional salad garden or pea patch, for the most part we use it for composting, yard waste disposal, and as a spot to accommodate our youngest’s love for burning the Christmas tree when I take it down in February. Our children continue to lobby for digging it up and putting in a pool, but I know who’d end up maintaining it (the same one who always got stuck cleaning the aquarium) and told them we have a perfectly good city pool within walking distance that is clean and affordable to use. Feel free to enjoy!

I do love to grow things. Every spring around Easter I buy the usual assortment of impatiens, petunias (because my Grandmama Jackson always had those and they remind me of her), marigolds, and vincas and put them in pots on the porch and patio. My choice is always the same because those withstand the heat through the summer and I know my limitations when it comes to watering. They also withstand the cat, who considers flower pots her personal porch furniture.

When the kids were small, I enlisted them every year to help me get the pots out, fill them with dirt, and choose which flowers to put in each one. We’d all get dirty and I think they enjoyed it. I know I did. As teenagers, their enthusiasm waned and there was some mutiny in the ranks so I soldiered on alone. The middle one would, however, still help me haul the pots and equipment out from under the house and transport them to the back porch, and the other two would go with me to pick out the flowers without much complaint. All of us liked the colorful surroundings when reading or eating out on the porch.

When we bought our first house there was a vacant lot nearby, and for a few years we were able to have a large garden on it. We owned a small chest freezer, and with our harvest, supplemented by my parents and Kent’s grandparents, filled it each year with peas, butterbeans, and corn. We canned green beans, tomatoes, and pears and these, along with some from my parent’s garden, filled our pantry shelves. We ate well during those years. It was fun. The kids got a small taste of my experience as a child and we had a lot of teachable moments planting, pulling weeds, and harvesting.

When we moved to our current house, I had aspirations of having a large garden again. But we were in the midst of the travel ball, league sports, and summer camp season of life and there wasn’t enough time or energy for more than the porch flowers and an occasional tomato plant. I did manage to plant the English pea seeds passed down to me from my Mama and Papa Reid. They were one of my favorite tastes in childhood. My grandparents grew them, my parents grew them, I grew them with our children, and a few weeks ago I planted them in our back yard with our granddaughter. It’s pretty cool knowing that they are part of my heritage. I have done my best to keep them growing and to preserve them for the generations to come. Hopefully, she’ll like them enough to pass them on one day to her kids.

I think she’s got the gardening gene. Her parents let her help them with planting and watering in their yard and watering the flowers is one of her favorite things to do when she comes to our house. She and I are already planning our spring flower date and keeping tabs on the English peas.

That garden plot in our back yard? Maybe she and I will take it over and fill up the freezer one of these days. For now, though, it will only be growing English peas, onions, and a radish or two. Oh, it also has a couple of dried up Christmas trees sitting on it and the wall around it makes a great balance beam.

 

 

Second Hand Lions, New Line Cinema, 2003, 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment

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