Gardening

What is it about nature or gardening that brings such serenity? I read (part of) “Walden; or Life in the Woods” in high school and the only thing I remember is that I didn’t understand how a person could go on for what felt like a hundred pages describing the fifty shades of green on a single leaf without falling asleep. I’m a few decades older and, while I’ve never made a second attempt at reading Thoreau, I have realized there’s something fundamentally relaxing about spending time in nature or even a garden, specifically if you’re the one trying to grow things.

A few months ago, my daughter and I planted some new seeds in my raised garden bed. We filled some cardboard egg cartons with soil and tucked in our seeds for cucumbers, zucchini, spinach, cilantro, and jalapenos (that way I could close the lid so the birds wouldn’t eat all the seeds before they got a chance to grow). I also put some carrot and watermelon seeds straight into the garden bed hoping for the best. Yet again, I forgot to water them daily during the first couple weeks (apparently, that’s kind of important) and most of our little plants failed to thrive with the sole exception of my watermelons, which were doing a fabulous interpretation of Cinderella’s pumpkin before it turned into a coach.

Then I discovered a nasty little infestation of ugly bugs that ate more than half of my beautiful, green vines – complete with curly cues – before I finally remembered to buy some pest killer. I assumed it was pretty potent because the label said to wear gloves and stand up wind when sprinkling the white poison all over the afflicted plants. The next day the bugs were completely gone, so my watermelon vines got a good rinse and a healthy dose of plant food. I am thrilled to say that I now have several baby watermelons the size of grapes and three the size of softballs. My harvest won’t keep us fed through the winter but we may get a couple snacks worth of our melons. Plus, it’s really pretty climbing up the lattice sides of my garden bed.

I suppose I enjoy the reassurance that I actually can create something when the fruits of my labor reward me with Renaissance-esque vines bearing cute, little, green softballs. While I’ve never considered myself an artist, I feel vastly incomplete if I’m not creating something. And while I love my little plants, I’m 99.9 percent certain I won’t be writing fifty pages describing their particular shades of green…although I will say I never noticed how fuzzy watermelon vines are.