The Garden Plot

My mom had a garden.

Every year, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, and so many zucchini would compete for space with sprawling strawberry plants and gigantic bushes of rhubarb. Grandpa’s hops covered the side and back fence with rough vines and papery layered cones. Their bright green presence was a constant source of frustration to her. Hops are a key ingredient in beer. Beer is alcohol. Alcohol is evil. Evil must be eradicated.

But hops are tenacious and determined, in their way, and she never won that fight. Not even with gasoline and fire. Every year, they came back lush and green, drooping with leaves, and producing more. I’m not sure she ever gave up, though.

Imagine the biggest fight of your life being with a vine that won’t go away. I know it wasn’t, for her, but the conversations we had about it and the conviction in her voice that this time, this year, she’d win made it seem so much more epic than the preferential blip it became in hindsight.

Little canals carved straight lines down each row, and it was often my job to put the garden hose at the top of the garden and let that water fill the space, watering each plant as the porous Montana dirt drank it down, leaving swirls in the soil and muddy tracks on the sidewalk. I was never very good at the growing of green things. My skills were honed by baby kittens, muddy horses, and huffing dogs on walks through sagebrush and alfalfa. Still, I could tell a weed from a radish. Eventually.

No matter how much Mom tried to keep it all separate, there were always “volunteer” plants that popped up in the wrong row or last year’s crops resurrecting without invitation. Some we kept, some we plucked out to leave room for the intended growth—a careful dance to keep the balance.

Mom nurtured that garden, weeding and harvesting, until the dog days of summer beat everything into submission. By then, we were harvesting corn from the neighbor’s field and shucking, parboiling, wrapping, and freezing all we could because nothing tastes like farm-fresh corn in the bleakness of a Montana February.

Living in a farming community, our little quarter-acre garden was more a habit born of a memory of poverty and my mom’s love of growing things than an enterprise. Her nurturing spent on the songs she sang to African violets and the KURL Christian radio station always left playing in the background for the houseplants. She believed the soothing sounds of Focus on the Family and the genteel southern voices of pastors thousands of miles away were necessary for their growth and development. A constant drone of noise preventing us from experiencing the warm, velvet intensity of silence.

Every June, we jostled with robins and killdeer to get to intense, deep red strawberries. Not usually any bigger than a large marble, they were red to the core and bursting with flavor. I’d never bought strawberries, myself, until my husband raved about the giant strawberries in Southern California. Imagine my disappointment when that bright red berry was white in the core and tasted like some sort of tired, over-processed natural strawberry flavoring. Not the same.

Mom probably could have packed up her giant zucchinis and carrots and potatoes and filled a farmer’s market stall, if there had been such a thing in our postage stamp town. It just wasn’t done then. Especially since most people had their own gardens.

When she had her accident in 1992 the gardening life no longer an option.

My sister and her family moved in on Christmas Eve, and she loved that space too, even if she had to fight for it. Her fight was with the chickens and pigs, and goats. A much more elemental struggle that consisted of chicken wire and electric fences.

Eventually, they moved on, too, and the garden was left to itself.

Abandoned to encroaching hop vines, the robins and killdeer, prairie winds blew the dirt canals into each other until a barren space remained. The next spring, there was no turning over the dirt, no nimble fingers picking weeds and scattering seeds. No little popsicle stick markers with seed packets over them to tell us what was coming before the little green shoots came through.

The garden lay fallow and abandoned.

Without a gardener or a plan, the strawberries, rhubarb, and overwintered potatoes competed with swirling curly hop vines. They came and went with just intermittent rain and Big Sky sunshine to guide their growth. The occasional strawberry picked and eaten warm from the vine was the only harvesting that remained.

Decades later, the house is gone, the poplar trees are gone, and the fields are overgrown and unruly. Even now, though, I would put money on feral hop vines spreading across the elm trees as the space has done what gardeners call “returning to nature”.

Somewhere else on that patch of land near Fly Creek, I imagine strawberry plants in the shade of trees, transplanted by over-enthusiastic birds.

Unless they completely rototilled the space and gutted it? The rhubarb, woody and spindly, without consistent watering, could maybe still struggle to rise as much as possible in the absence of care. Even after all these years.

A cultivated space produces and nourishes, but left untended, it only survives, if raggedly, for a time. Slowly submitting to stronger forces and elemental changes until only the most tenacious, the most determined, the most ferocious remain, present and alive but crippled and stunted. A version of its former self, but not quite the same.

The plants become something else. Feral.

Few varieties survive in the open space with the strength to fight the weeds and survive in solitude. Those that return don’t thrive. No one is harvesting to hoard their bounty in Ball canning jars and freezers full of parboiled corn.

Gardens are a passion and, for many, over the millennia, a necessity for survival. Small home gardens have kept families alive far longer than big box grocery stores, and small, chic farmers’ markets have existed. Three rows of green beans once turned into walls of preserves. Awkwardly shaped carrots were scrubbed, and the vine-ripened tomatoes tasted by a sneaky bird when carved and washed as we shared the harvest, albeit begrudgingly.

Mom’s garden produced food, but not everything was picture-perfect or presentation-worthy. We didn’t need it to be. The point of the garden was to feed us, not to be marketable. Our time was spent with grubby toes and sun hats, piles of vegetables in the red wagon, an act of service edged in gratitude and laced with the grumbling of an ungrateful 12-year-old.

We were the keepers of the garden, and the garden was, in its way, a keeper of us. A circle of work and production, nurture and offering that gently ebbed and flowed under the Milky Way and blazing orange sunsets. We were ungainly and knobby and awkward. Just like our knobby and ungainly vegetables.

Yet, if we’d had a stall at some fictitious farmer’s market. If we’d had the pressure of selecting only the best and prettiest to set in baskets on gingham-covered tables under signs that read “by the pound” or “by the piece”, the nature of enterprise would have taken the place of a simple, quiet morning brushing our hands through strawberry leaves. Industry and purpose would have kept our hands busy instead of slipping past the white blossoms and lime green unripened fruit as we reached for the prize we’d brush off with a t-shirt and eat in the morning light. That innocence and candor would have been overshot by the need to do more, have more, sell more.

Driven, we would have hustled as if our livelihood and our lives depended on it. The battle with the hops would have been a battle for survival, and not just the unwelcome guest or reminder of past failures. We’d need more space, more ground. More workers. High numbers. Better seed.

Rhubarb isn’t trending! Cut it out! Heirloom tomatoes, purple and striped, would need to be staked out and supported by old milk jugs filled with water to keep them hot in the cool nights. The whims of spreadsheets and projections would tell us zucchini was passé and green beans are not profitable. We must revamp. Expand our offerings.

Make it work for us. Make it serve us. No matter how tired the soil became.

In that reality, the point of the garden would cease to be about what the family needed and would become what strangers needed or wanted as they meandered down the aisles, sampling and critiquing. Each interaction is a minute or two focused on feeding a specific need before being driven to the next stall, the next purchase, the next indulgence. Canvas bags fill slowly as boxes on specific recipe cards are checked and grocery lists examined.

Shopping for preference. Meeting demands. Ignoring seasons and the creativity of using only what happens to have grown in its own time.

Completing a list is the opposite of living and reveling in what has developed in front of you. There is a certain gentleness in taking of what is in front of you and, when life gives you 10 bushels of tomatoes, you eat tomato soup, make tomato sauce, and eat raw tomatoes drizzled in olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper until you can’t bear any more. The simplicity of choosing to live on a tomato-fueled menu until the next crop comes through and you drown in zucchini everything. The variety is dictated by the natural ripening cycles and not the anxious demands of the marketplace.

As demanding as the canopy-covered booth would be, it only existed because the garden existed. Yet, even a neglected garden produces something, and you could live for some time on whatever naturally is produced in a neglected plot. Sure, you wouldn’t have the finest, but you’d have something, and besides, you are busy at the market. You have customers to please, sales to make, and images to keep up. If you aren’t too picky about the quality, it is possible to populate a market stall for a while with volunteer and feral plants.

Besides, intentional gardening is hard.

So you let it go. You harvest only what you find. Some plants disappear completely, some hang on for a season or two. Some come back hardier, less flavorful, less beautiful. Their entire energy and effort went into struggling through the packed dirt and not into producing lush fruit. The plants that remain become feral, untamed, less nutritious, and no longer saleable. Volunteer plants pop up in unexpected places and wilt quickly as the roots lack what they need to thrive.

Finally, the garden is abandoned for another pursuit, another commercial enterprise. Another sales pitch. More customers. Different customers.

Weeds fill the space, sharing purpose with dandelions and decaying vegetation.

Life and faith are something like a garden. Interwoven in the Bible are allusions to the church, the Body, as a garden. It is easy to see the comparison as the words in red share ideals and guidelines for communities created, curated, and protected, so they provide for each other. We live and die together or not at all. Called to an existence of humanity in a cycle of care and sustaining effort, the allegorical Fruit is a byproduct of the act of being and not the purpose. A dance of harmonious growth, bursts of energy followed by seasons of quiet. External bounty fueled by early mornings and the soft sound of water flowing down to thirsty roots. Nothing forced. Every part is useful.

An environment of nurture and purpose. Recognizing the value of what has grown, supporting the stems that hang heavy, removing the thorns that threaten to choke the newest, the greenest, the smallest.

There are no words that I know of, in the words that tell us how to love each other and serve God, that suggest abandoning the community for the sake of the sales pitch. No stone tablets telling us that the number of people who frequent our booth is the affirming equivalent of having succeeded in strengthening the people we swore to love.

There is no admonishment from the prophets in their furs and misery about ministry taking precedence over the people. No words from the Apostles or the One they served that tell us to follow the mandates of a spreadsheet and budget meeting.

It seems that it’s almost as though the entwined lives of the community are of far greater importance. More significant than the ministries that need them. Or the entrepreneurs who craft their brochures and podcasts. The advertisers who pay for them.

I can’t help but think there are quite a few who have forgotten that the garden doesn’t even need the farmer’s market.

It never did.