Inch By Inch, Row By Row
by Ana Braga-Henebry in Homemaking on Thursday, August 05, 2010 6:00 AM
An ordinary July day in our acreage will find me coming in sometime in the day dirty, sweaty, smiling and with an armful of garden produce to be deposited on the kitchen counter. And yet, unlike most of my South Dakotan friends who grew up “walking beans” or digging potatoes alongside their parents back in the family farm, I have no memories of vegetable-growing as a little girl.
If there is one thing our garden is clear evidence of, it is the fact that anyone can plant a successful garden!
Back when I as was about nine or ten, I made tiny rows in the shady patch of dirt behind our outdoor playhouse and attempted to line up similar-looking weeds, simulating pictures I had seen in books of what vegetable gardens were supposed to be. Of course I promptly forgot all about it and when one day I went to check its progress, I couldn’t see a trace of what I had done. It is amazing to me to think of my own ignorance: my kids know so much more about gardens than I did then. And mind you, they don’t know all that much.
I married, we were grad students, and then I was pregnant. Overnight, every seed seemed to me to be begging to be planted. I planted an avocado seed. I planted a mango seed. When they got too big I put them in pots outside our Texan apartment door. Winter killed them, of course. I planted beans on the apartment complex landscape and one colleague thought I opened cans and planted them—I guess he had never thought of beans as raw, dry, plant-able things!
My husband’s post-doc took us to idyllic Kansas—the best climate we have ever lived in. Hot summers (as summers should be) with plenty of outdoor swimming, and yet green shady trees, snowy winters without the northern plains’ extremes. There we bought our first home, a 1910 colonial with a darling backyard and a wonderful neighbor gardener whose mouth-watering vegetables were only matched by his glorious flower garden, planted exclusively to decorate his church.
What initiated me into the world of vegetable-gardening in Kansas was a good friend, a stay-at-home dad who was a superb gardener and who didn’t mind trading advice and hands-on-tutoring in exchange for some sewing and babysitting.
Moving to South Dakota five years ago presented the ultimate challenge. The space, the high quality of the rich soil, the shortened summer ... plus our own apple, cherry and mulberry trees, all contributed to our decision to drastically change the quality and cost of the vegetables we consume. Keeping the utility of our efforts in mind, we make clear that ours is no hobby garden. We grow plenty of the same varieties of beans, potatoes, onions or eggplant—varieties chosen because that are processed and stored most easily. We experiment only with a higher health and yield in mind. We learn a lot every season, and the kids with us. We lose some production every year to a new unforeseen problem and the garden, summer after summer, is always expanding and never the same.
I have noticed recently how our family garden has become a whole family affair. Even the reluctant kids, the ones who don’t like mosquito bites or hard manual labor, seem to have somehow found a part of the garden life to be involved with: some like planting, some prefer picking, or even weeding a bed or two. We work together and great conversations take place among the newly growing onions and peas.
Family conversations are not the only side benefit of a family garden. The quiet, growing green world, with the background music of the wind on the trees and the busy birds, turns itself into a most natural place of prayer. Truly I cannot imagine the family garden without its prayer dimension. Even the body position, the kneeling amidst young light green beds for careful weeding, the crawling between the emerging rows, even these help bring, naturally, the prayer from the heart and mind. So we form the habit of praying a Hail Mary every time we kneel by a bed, and the children away from home are routinely prayed for, among a never-ending streams of other prayer intentions.
I wonder if my kids will purchase their vegetables from the grocery store without a thought and never venture with their own families into this dirty, happy and fertile world of gardening. On the other hand, once the ill effects of the mass production and transportation of vegetables to grocery stores is fully understood, perhaps they will have no option, and family and community gardens will have become part of their life.
I like to think, though, that whatever their future brings, my children will have memories of timing seed-starting to their seasons and will know how to carefully transplant young broccoli plants and when to pick and braid their garlic and onion plants. And that they too will, when kneeling on the fertile, generous ground to put in their tomato plants, remember to pray for each other.
— Ana Braga-Henebry has a Masters Degree in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has written myriad articles for Catholic homeschool periodicals, has been writing book reviews for over ten years, and blogs from the family acreage in South Dakota.
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