Words From a Novice Vegetable Grower
Meg Giuliano
By Meg Giuliano
Climate Fellow
Clean Air-Cool Planet
Jenny, one of the garden managers at Strawbery Banke, is a practical, no-nonsense woman who really knows her stuff. As I sat down to meet with her about my new community garden plot, it was as if she knew what I was going to say before I even opened my mouth. I can’t quite remember how I had intended to begin the conversation (I was probably thinking something like, “So, I don’t have any idea what I am doing”) but she cut me off after my first word, saying, “You know more than you think you do.”
Perhaps…but I still wasn’t sure exactly where to begin. I had just arrived at my home for the summer – Hough House, at the Strawbery Banke Museum – and unfortunately, I was a bit too late to plant from seed. Worse, it looked like the other gardeners had set their plots into motion ages ago. I knew in the back of my mind that all would be well in the end, but it was totally unclear to me how I was supposed to start. So, I sat there, staring at my weedy patch of dirt.
Gardens are actually very familiar to me, from the wonderful smell of a tomato stem to the feeling of warm, damp soil on my hands. I spent the summers of my childhood playing alongside (and in!) my parents’ extensive vegetable garden, a veritable forest of tomatoes and broccoli and eggplant and towering sunflowers. These days, during the academic year, I volunteer on local farms and organize community events at my graduate school that are centered on sustainable food and agriculture.
But this seemed different, somehow. Perhaps because this was my very own plot, my own “bit of earth,” as Mary Lennox called it in The Secret Garden (one of my favorite books as a child), and I alone was responsible for helping it to grow productively. Unless you count a failed attempt at city-style bucket-gardening in Somerville, MA a few years back, I had never tried to make a garden. This time, it was my job to choose the plants and plan their spots, to think about how to use the limited space and nutrients and sunlight most efficiently.
For me, new things are sometimes intimidating, even when they shouldn’t be. Maybe it’s because I am a perfectionist at heart, though my experiences as a scientist and teacher have taught me that nothing ever happens perfectly the first time. When I don’t know what’s going on, I usually turn to books, and this time was like all the others – I went straight to the library and found a pile of books about organic gardening, kitchen gardening, growing food. They were helpful, of course, but they still didn’t tell me exactly how to start, what to plant, or where to plant it.
I quickly realized that my fellow gardeners were going to be my best resource. Jenny, of course, is full of knowledge and tricks and information, and some of the other gardeners have had plots in this place for ten years. Yet, for these folks, each summer is a new and creative experiment – an adventurous endeavor in gardening. Each year, the community gardeners try to grow something new, or, better yet, something old in a new way.
In the end, we decided that I should go to the Portsmouth Farmers’ Market to buy seedlings, which I did two Saturdays ago. I planted Sungolds and Brandywine tomatoes, red and green lettuce, bell peppers, basil, cucumbers, beans, kale…really, I just walked around and snapped up whatever caught my fancy. After an hour or so of weeding and turning (being sure not to harm the tiny rogue seedlings of orach and dill that Jenny identified for me), I planted my little veggies and hoped for the best.
Now, a week and a half later, I have a couple of yellow flowers on the tomatoes, and everything is still alive and mostly thriving (yay!). I’m looking forward to future hours of playing in the sun and dirt, and to the (eventual) harvest, and I’m excited to meet and learn from the other gardeners. It turns out that starting a garden is not so hard after all.
Last year, I read a wonderful editorial by Michael Pollen in the New York Times, entitled “Why Bother?” In this piece, Pollen sets out a case for planting a garden, as one example of something individuals can do to simultaneously combat climate change and improve the quality of their own lives. He closes with the following paragraph, which I think about whenever I check on my seedlings:
“At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools…The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit…suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”
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Tags: farming, food and climate, garden, sustainability, vegetable garden
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