Every year I am completely amazed that my little backyard garden experiment actually works.
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While most of my growing seasons are more error than trial, this year’s bounty has turned my thumbs green with gratitude.
I have spent the better part of July harvesting cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, San Marzano tomatoes, onions, green beans, cucumbers, zucchini, bell and poblano and jalapeno peppers, and a huge crop of pride.
The life cycle of a vegetable garden is charged with emotion.
In spring, it’s all hope and possibilities. There is soil to amend, seeds to start and layouts to design.
Summer brings the mania of constant care as we head out early to water and devote weekends to weeding.
In fall, we bask in the bounty and embrace pariah season as we push two zucchinis with every handful of grape tomatoes.
I learned the basics of gardening from my father, who for years tended to a tiny plot behind our garage. He grew the usual fare but tomatoes were his favorite and his pride and joy.
When my husband and I bought our first house, my dad helped stake out a plot, turn over the soil and plant our first official garden.
Though he was more of a practical guy than philosophical theorist, every now and then, he’d share a reverent kind of wisdom.
“If you want the earth to take care of you,” he’d say, “you have to take care of the earth.”
The land, he said, is a reflection of how we treat it.
Oddly enough, my vegetable garden did well for years, until 2023, the year my father passed away. Suddenly, yields were down and the plants looked small and straggly.
Last summer, when the entire plot seemed depressed, I did some testing. Turns out, years of planting in the same pattern had depleted the soil of essential nutrients, specifically nitrogen.
I felt as if I’d let my little plot of earth bleed out. I devised a plan to rectify things. Compost was added, the garden was expanded to add new land, nutrient-rich soil was poured across the top. And I fertilized in fall and spring.
Naturally, I expected improvements.
What I didn’t expect was a mid-July explosion of ready-to-eat goods.
The difference is astounding.
The kitchen island has become a production line with expiration dates clogging my brain. There’s the Monday bowl of tomatoes, the Tuesday collection of peppers, and the assortment from this morning.
All of the juicy, organic items are screaming “eat me now or else,” with else being the godawful smell of decomposition that can make even the strongest stomach heave.
I am grateful, of course, and determined to make good on Mother Nature’s bounty. I’ve been cooking, chopping, blanching and freezing like a fiend.
And we’ve been eating like a couple of health nuts.
Zucchini bread, tomato sauce, appetizers, summer salads, snack plates, pasta with zucchini, zucchini and tomato omelets, enchiladas, tacos and, of course, pizza bread. Yum, yum, and more yum.
I’ve shared with neighbors. I gave some to my oldest daughter.
When I tried to leave a bag on my youngest daughter’s kitchen table, she snapped, “Don’t you dare.” She, too, has a garden that is over-achieving. It’s a good year for Instagrammers.
Of course, I’m grateful, even if it conjures up images of Lucy stuffing her face with chocolates on the assembly line.
Still, my father would be impressed. Though he’s been gone two years, I often stumble across signs that his spirit lingers.
Growing up, my fierce sense of independence often put us at odds. He would openly wish I would “just get a good job with benefits,” and stop all this going to college with dreams of becoming a writer stuff.
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“I need to follow my heart,” I’d demand.
“You need to be able to eat and pay the bills,” he’d counter.
Turns out, both of us were right.
I can’t remember ever asking him for help but I have a long list of the ways he did anyway.
Once when I was a college freshman, he asked how I was getting home for the holidays. I said I was going to hop a ride with anyone heading north. The next morning, he was waiting in the semi-circle drive in front of my dorm.
Another time I sighed during a phone conversation that I’d never get my kitchen painted and he drove over, tape and drop cloths in hand.
The Christmas after my mother passed, I mentioned my trivial quest to find a very specific light-up snowman for my front porch. A few days later, he delivered a giant box. How could I tell him it wasn’t the one I was looking for? How could I not love it more than the one I’d been looking for?
Whenever they visit, I urge my grandchildren to visit my garden, not so much to become miniature farmers, but to learn where food comes from and to hopefully absorb the concept of reciprocity.
Most days, after my quality control walk through my “Laotian jungle,” I head clear across the yard to tend to my memory garden, a space dedicated to the family members we have lost.
Hovering over the plot is a red maple tree planted specifically for my father because the red maple symbolizes “environmental stewardship, sustainability, and our responsibility to protect and preserve nature for future generations.”
It is a quiet garden that faces the sunset. On a recent morning, as I pulled weeds around the hydrangeas and deadheaded the coreopsis, I came across a surprise of mystical proportions.
A tomato plant stood proudly beneath the maple tree, bearing three yellow flowers.
I’m not sure of the variety but the message is clear:
As much as it fills the belly, a garden really feeds the soul.
Donna Vickroy is an award-winning reporter, editor and columnist who worked for the Daily Southtown for 38 years. She can be reached at [email protected].