Hi. My name is [withheld to protect the innocent] and I don’t garden.
Whew! There, I said it!
Oh sure, it may not seem like a big deal to you but you have to understand the context. See, I live in Floyd County, Virginia, in a home that was hand-built in 1941 by the old timer who still lives down the road, tends his own cattle and, no doubt, has a cellar full of green beans and tomatoes and succotash that he and his wife grew and canned. I bet on the back shelves, there are dusty jars dating back decades.
This is a place where people don’t ask, “Are you putting in a garden this year?”
They ask, “What have you put in your garden so far this year?” And when I say, “No, no garden this year,” they look at me with a mixture of confusion and pity as though they were thinking, “She looked so normal but I reckon unhinged can hide in plain sight in this crazy new world.”
That’s when I find myself rambling, trying to justify my omission of this critical country life-support mechanism. “We’re in a CSA,” I say. “We like to support the local farmers!”
And we are in a CSA and it is enough produce to get the small family of just my husband and me through every weeknight dinner and often then some. But that’s not why I don’t garden.
I tried. I swear I tried. I even met a master gardener just months after moving here and with her encouragement, I went all out, pampering, primping and planting some 300 square feet of veggies and herbs in a space that had clearly been a garden for who knows how many decades back.
Being friends with a master gardener is great for learning how to start seeds, when to transplant them, which plants to deadhead and which to let alone. But it doesn’t at all change the fact that I would often forget to water and could never quite convince myself to make a daily hobby of weeding.
Consequently, the broccoli and broccoli raab never got past a few weak sprouts; the two varieties of kale stayed so puny they were hard to distinguish from the overgrown volunteers. I’m not sure what happened to either of my pepper varieties and I’m pretty sure I never saw more than a leaf or two where the eggplant was meant to be. The mints and hearty herbs grew, there’s no holding them back, and I even saw a few hard, green orbs hiding in the tomato cages surrounding the four or five varieties of slicers and paste tomatoes I planted, but the deer took care of those before I could fret over when to harvest.
That was about it for me.
Even before the deer came, though, the garden was weighing on me, a dirt and manure albatross hanging on my spring and summer, the voices of the flip gardeners saying, “You just stick something in the ground and if it doesn’t grow, you stick something else in the ground,” ringing in my ears like the accusations of a parent whose kid has given up on eating ice cream because her first scoop fell out of her cone and onto the sidewalk.
But gardening is no scoop of ice cream, my friends. It isn’t even a hobby. It’s a lifestyle. Like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, it wants your blood, sweat and time. It wants you to put down that book, forego that hike, spend daily downtime on your knees grooming, watering, adoring.
I had a boyfriend like that once and I didn’t keep him, either.
My friends still offer me their extra seedlings, though whether they mean it as encouragement or they simply forget about this non-gardening outlier in their midst, I don’t know.
What I do know is that letting myself not garden, allowing that land to revert to grass and picking up my locally-grown vegetables, already bagged and waiting for me weekly in a walk-in cooler, has been liberating, freeing my time and mind for work and play that I find more enjoyable and relaxing.
Still, I stutter through that simple and often-asked question, “What have you put in your garden so far this year?”
Sarah Beth Jones is co-owner and lead cheerleader of Nary Ordinary Business Services where she, her hubby and their team help small, micro and artisan business owners discover their definition of success and achieve it. Learn more at www.naryordinary.com.
