Requiem for our Garden

When we moved a few weeks ago, we said goodbye to our hodgepodge garden: the jumble of green we’d planted in spurts of inspiration and frustrated restlessness during our six-month real estate search.

Its creation story:

Shortly after moving to Virginia, we saved the seeds from a grocery-purchased butternut squash. We’ll often roast squash seeds as a snack, but it was nearing spring and we thought we could try something different. We gathered simple supplies — a plastic seedling flat and soil — and stuffed the seeds into a dozen or so cells with little expectations for our juvenile experiment. But! A week later, green sprouts pushed themselves skyward. And a week after that, their astounding survival rate meant they were crowding each other out. So we knocked on our landlord’s door (we lived in their basement) for that classic consultation: would they bless the marriage of our squash seedlings with their lawn? And they said yes!

We shyly scraped away the grass atop an old garden bed and stuffed 20-30 squash seedlings into a tiny 1 ft. x 3 ft. area. We felt guilty to banish them to certain death in the late winter weather but were satisfied that we had at least given them a chance.

Emboldened by the magic of seed + soil + water → green growing thing, we unsealed a few packages of our prized pole beans. We had carried these beans for 12 months from New Zealand with the care usually reserved for fine jewelry, going so far as to formulate contingency plans for smuggling them past customs as if they were an illicit family heirloom. Their imaginative names bring to mind the cultures responsible for their heritage: Tarahumara Dark Purple, Blue Shackamaxon, Flor de Mayo, Major Cook, Iraqi Climbing Beans. And their technicolorful coatings of light pink, dark blue, and speckled red and tan make pinto beans seem hopelessly dull. 

We cradled a few beans from 5 or so varieties and tucked them into soil-filled cells in our makeshift basement nursery. A few days later, green flipped above the surface, some little guys with their bean shells still clinging to the cotyledon. But pole beans need to climb something. So, when it was obvious that they were suffocating in their confines, we scavenged fallen tree limbs from the forest floor and constructed a poor man’s trellis. 

With each new housing disappointment — lost bids, soaring prices, disappointing options — we channeled our desperation into hacking away at our landlord’s lawn with blunt instruments and tossed in an unplanned assortment of seeds and seedlings.

Friends donated tomato and basil plants. We built up an inventory of herbs from markets, friends’ gardens, and even our old wedding herbs from California (kept alive by my mother for two years and gently packed into our bags on our last visit). Thai basil, purple basil, lemon basil, holy basil, sage, spearmint, chocolate mint, peppermint, mountain mint, more sage, oregano, rosemary, cilantro, marjoram, and more sage. We buried 10 sweet potato slips into a smaller rectangle than our more experienced friend allocates to a single plant (we later learned). And we sprinkled seeds of all sorts into dug-up plots just to see what would come up. Corn: strong, fast growers. Okra: Late bloomers but reliable producers. Muskmelon: Needs more space and probably planted too late. Kale and chard: consumed by early-summer predators before they had a chance. Lemon basil: too slow of a grower to muscle its way through other fast-growing vegetables.

But most voracious of all: lemon cucumber. To mention lemon cucumber would strike fear in our step as we walked out to check on the garden. In mere days, the meek cucumber seedlings transformed into giant green monsters, their tendrils reaching up and ripping to the ground whatever was in their path: corn, marigold, tomatoes, my rickety bean trellis. It seemed twice a day we were forced to patrol the mess and break the aggressive cucumber’s hold off their unfortunate neighbors. Finally, Lauren designed a system to constrain their greedy fingers by tying their growing ends up bamboo stakes, away from our other children, er, plants. And for our strict parenting we’ve been rewarded with beautiful flowers and a handful of sweet cucumbers every few days.

Peppers, watermelon, eggplant, and midseason propagated tomatoes round out our lawn-takeover.

And that 1 ft. x 3 ft. plot of squash? The plants shocked us with their persistence, surviving their unsavory conditions to the point of strangling each other. Lacking the heart to Sophie’s-Choice a squash or two, we took the coward’s way out and transplanted 90% of them to random grass-dominated plots scattered throughout the yard and let nature finish the job that we could not stomach. But to our astonishment, most of the squash have flourished! Sending their solar-panel sized leaves sprawling across the yard, opening their golden-trumpet flowers to an orgy of bees, and producing bounties of butternut squash with dark orange flesh and an array of seeds ready to be planted next spring.

People are surprised by my lack of sorrow for leaving our garden right as the harvests were coming in. But I don’t fear its death due to our lack of oversight. As the lawn browned and our potted trees wilted during this hot, dry summer, the garden showed few signs of suffering even though it only received a meager sprinkling once every few weeks. We live less than 3 miles away now, allowing us to easily pop over to grab some cucumbers, squash, and okra a few times per week. And to get our new garden started, we unabashedly dug up most of the herbs (and regretfully tried the same with a few vegetables, with sad results.)

In any case, we’ve been blessed to have more than our share of harvesting joy these past few years. Thanks to the early autumn timing of our farm excursions, we would arrive just in time to cash in the labors of others after their months of bed preparation, weeding, watering, and so forth. We were due for a reversal there.

We leave behind a wild garden, hoping we’ve helped create a more diverse, interesting spot than we found. (I wonder if our landlords knew what they were getting themselves into when we asked permission to plant a few squash seedlings.) And we take with us our lessons from our first Virginia gardening experience.

Oh, and a few of those herbs. We took those too.