Friday, February 10, 2012

A Story of Life, Love, and Loss... Or Maybe Just Starting Seeds

It was a fatal day in high school when the pernicious seed was planted in my tender mind: gardening would be a perfect hobby.

Sunlight. Fresh air. Relaxation. Warm earth. Good exercise. Abundant fruit.

I should have doused the idea with RoundUp the moment it germinated. But alas... it took root and my garden fantasies have proven a much more fertile ground than my backyard ever since.

It all started with 96 styrofoam cups, strategically arranged in my mother's cake pans. I plunked some virgin dirt and a few seeds in each cup, poked holes in the bottoms, set them in her cake pans with some water, and put them in the warmest brightest spot in our house I could think of: the top shelves of my closet.

Yes, dear friends, I was a closet gardener.

But my secret didn't last long. When my sister wanted to bake and couldn't find the square cake pans, I was forced to sacrifice some of my precious incubating trays for a dish of cornbread. My seedlings never forgave me. One by one the bright spring green shoots flopped over, limp as a tantruming toddler, and they never rose again.

Of the 96 seeds started, exactly one survived. I babied it in my windowsill so long it actually grew a little cherry-sized pepper. When it threatened to die, I ate the pepper and buried the plant in the compost alongside my dreams. Gardening was a bitter disappointment.

And then I married a farmer.

Suddenly, gardening sprang back up from the depths of the smoldering compost heap to the upper echelon my interests. I was a natural born gardener! I was made for this! It's in my bones!

Old fantasies die hard.

Despite the mixed success/failure of our gardens the past few years, that little seed of interest sown back in high school continues to bloom each year, and once again I find myself on this cold February afternoon...


... starting seeds.

4 comments:

The_Extremely_Bearish_Bear said...

This was good.  Very punny...but...four words: NEXT LOVE STORY INSTALLMENT!   :-)  Pretty pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?

The_Extremely_Bearish_Bear said...

Guess what?!  Our friends Ed & Loretta offered to let us go halvsies on their garden!  Loretta loves to garden but works fulltime and doesn't have as much time as it needs.  So I'm going to help her plant  and then I'll take Sweet Baby over there a few times a week to weed.  When it's time to harvest, I'll help her with the canning and we'll split the bounty.  I'm so excited.  I've never been much for the work involved with gardening but I think this year I'm ready to put my shoulder to the plow...

Farmer's City Wife said...

Awesome!! It's so much more fun to do it with someone else than to go it alone (and in my case it would be more successful if somebody else did the gardening, hehe).

Nancy Pong said...

Thanks for sharing thiis

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