Seeds planted long ago
When I prepared the ground in my new vegetable garden this month, dragging stones in the tines of my rake to the edge of my intended row, I saw my father’s rake making the same movement as I pulled and then pushed back some soil, evening the row out, bending to pull rocks too small to rake out of the new berm. It is a memory accessed through the gesture itself. In performing it, I saw and somehow felt my father making the same gesture. Metal implement on stone rang true. I’d heard it before, when I was a child.
It has been a month of planting—and two trips, one to D.C., one to Amsterdam—but my focus has been on the planting. My garden plot needed protection before anything could legitimately be sown. (The barn groundhog is the size of a wolverine this year!) When the fencing finally came by Memorial Day weekend, a little later than I wanted it, I scrambled to get kale, collard and chard plants in the ground. The second day had me planting cabbage and celeriac starts.
Then I traveled to Washington, DC for a long weekend. When I returned, over the course of a week, I planted tomatoes, squash, beets, shallots, parsley and basil, and moved a second beehive to my new beeyard. Last weekend I finally planted beans, carrots and arugula. We’ll see how they fare. It’s only a 25 by 25 foot plot, but I’m planting it densely, and taking notes about what works, and what doesn’t.
When I was a child, my dad planted a massive vegetable garden each year at our home in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. When he prepared the garden, I played outside with my brother, Ted. Sometimes we were enlisted to help.
Other than container gardening in our New York City apartment and on our terrace here in the nearby hamlet where we spent ten years of weekends and summers, I’ve never had the opportunity to plant a full-blown vegetable garden. I’m thrilled to finally be doing so. Nobody taught me how to do it; I’m winging it. Except that, I’ve realized, deep down somewhere, I took in at least some of it, when I was young.
Dad planted a garden in order to economize. We never bought vegetables all summer long, and we ate mostly preserved, frozen or prepared vegetables from the garden all winter. I remember being sent out before dinner many summer evenings to harvest lettuce or cucumbers or tomatoes. I remember the smells and the looks of those living plants, their lushness, their beauty. I don’t know if Dad regarded them that way. His example of always planting a large garden that kept us busy weeding, harvesting, cooking and preserving every summer—and the vivid, life-enhancing bounty that we dined upon—made me long to grow my own vegetables.
This year, I planted many starts, most of which came from the wonderful Greene Bee Greenhouse in Cornwallville, intermingled with some beets, carrots, beans, radish, cucumber and squash by seed. Beet seeds go in at about ½” deep, beans 1” and carrot seeds are whispered in to the surface of the soil. I know this because I read the seed packets before I planted, not due to any inherent or lingering childhood knowledge. But when I actually knelt to put those seeds in the ground, again, I remembered. It must be a memory of watching mostly, and maybe a little doing. I watched my father plant his vegetable garden for so many years, he must have given me a row here and there to plant myself. I have realized this month that these gestures, however fleeting they were to me as a child, live inside me.
When I was planting the bean seeds, for example, I poked my index finger in the ground up to its first bend—about an inch, I figured. Then I plopped a seed in there and covered it over. Somehow I know that Dad did it that way, too. Not that it’s a unique way to plant beans. I get it. But when you find yourself in an activity that you realize your parent did too, without you ever registering it when you were a kid, it makes you think. It made me think. Things like, what did Dad feel or remember when he planted his garden? Did he think of his paternal grandmother on her farm somewhere west and south of Pittsburgh? A farm he fondly described to us, often at the dinner table, often in terms of things his grandmother cooked there? Did planting ever make him happy, bring him a deep sense of contentment as it does me?
I don’t know. I will never know. He never shared much of his inner life except when he was erupting. He was an exacting, driven man whose accounting career should have been engineering, or maybe architecture. In addition to growing bushels and bushels of vegetables every summer, he painstakingly restored our 1865 Italianate Victorian house over 33 years on winter weekends by himself. The work was so beautiful and creatively executed with my mother’s input that our house was on the tour circuit every spring. He taught us to swim, water ski and sail on lakes Canandaigua and Seneca. But he was also rigid and controlling, risk averse and volatile. An insulin-dependent diabetic, he would lose his cool right before dinnertime every night, which from the age of 13 I was the sole witness to—my brother being elsewhere at home playing or doing homework, my mother commuting home from her hospital administrator job 40 minutes away in Rochester.
A few days ago, while I was planting radishes, I thought of the year he died on June 26, when he was 59 years old. I was barely an adult. There was no vegetable garden that year. In dying, he took with him over 30 years of gardening knowledge, which I’m feeling acutely this year. He also took with him a self-taught knowledge of carpentry, masonry, plumbing, electrical and painting—much to my brother’s sense of loss as he embarked on building his own home about a decade ago. Dad also never got to be a grandfather, a role that I believe would have brought him great comfort and perhaps, joy.
I held his hand as he took his last breath 23 years ago at home, facing the vegetable garden plot that had been his domain, along with the trees and perennials that he and my mother planted and tended. He was gruff and stubborn even in his dying, taking with him observations and experiences that we could have shared—a loss for both of us, for all of us.
I wanted more of life for him, gruff or not. He deserved it. And he could have taught me a lot about gardening, and other things, as I grew in to an adult who could finally listen, and learn from him.
As it is, he taught me some. I’m growing my own vegetables. Finally.
