On gardening and malaise.

Happier days.

Today I went out back and pulled up all the frost-deadened plants that once constituted a live garden. The peppers came up easily, as did the broccoli and cucumber. The tomatoes were more resistant. Wrapped and dried around their cages as they were, I had to break them apart before pulling both cage and roots from the ground. Small green cherry tomatoes and big, fat should-be-yellow heirlooms broke off the vines and rolled about on the cement patio. Jonah, in Tyrannosaurus rex rainboots, smashed a few underfoot, until I suggested that he and Manny set them aside for the neighborhood “Robber Squirrel,” as the boys have come to call him. They set about this task with gusto, making a pyramid of immature fruit to feed any creatures that might be interested.

Tearing my garden out was a mournful task, made worse by the fact that I procrastinated my way through the warm fall and was now forced to uproot on a gray, rain-spitting afternoon. I couldn’t help but feel guilty as I trashed the sad, dry skeletons and squashed their miscarried fruits under my feet. I failed my garden this summer, and looking at the plants’ remains was a pinch to my conscience. My zucchini plant was a fatality of midsummer frustration: I tore it out because it was five feet long and two feet high and producing absolutely zero zucchinis. While the yellow pepper plant gave us a dozen or so peppers, the mini red pepper plant was unfortunately located in its shadow and barely had a chance to show us what she could do. The cucumber vine was likewise buried under a jungle of zucchini and broccoli; it did do marginally better when I put a cage around it and took its long arms off the ground, but it never flourished. The onions didn’t grow larger than my fingernail; the peas were eaten by some rodent or another. And the tomato plants! The tomato plants! My poor tomato plants grew completely, completely out of control: They invaded one another’s cages; they knocked down their own cages in a fit of exuberant growth; they wouldn’t let anyone pass on the sidewalk without insisting on being trampled, they’d spread so far out of the garden. And I can’t tell you the number of once-beautiful yellow heirloom tomatoes that I found under a tangle of vines, rotten, a day or several past the point of human consumption.

Each time that I found a rotten tomato, though, or looked in vain for a zucchini squash, I knew that this garden was a disaster of my own making. I began this garden with a burst of enthusiasm. I envisioned the succulent and tasty harvest that would save me a few trips down the produce aisle during the summer months. I imagined getting my hands dirty, and my boys’ hands dirty, as we pulled weeds on summer mornings. I thought of keeping a journal, with details about the plants’ relative locations and output. I failed on almost every count. While I didn’t have to buy quite as much produce this summer, the garden vegetables were more a supplement than a replacement to our normal veggie intake. If I made it outside in the garden to weed (which was rare), I was generally too impatient with the boys to teach them the difference between friendly and enemy plants. The gardening journal is gathering dust in our buffet as I write, unsoiled by my schemes. And I never got it together enough to find out the basics of garden care after I put the plants in the ground. I know that ornamental flowers need to be trimmed back to encourage them to produce more, and I hear that it’s the same with vegetables; my tendency toward laziness, though, got in the way of me asking a gardener or performing basic research with book or internet. The work of uprooting today made me feel like Cain, but with vegetable blood crying out from the ground.

The garden, of course, is but one symptom of a larger tendency in my “real life,” my life outside the garden. Worthwhile projects are taken up with vigor and enthusiasm: The handmade cross-stitched Christmas ornaments with which I’d like to adorn our tree; the de-cluttering and organizing project aimed at making our home more aesthetically pleasing and easier to keep neat; the books begun in pursuit of being a better wife, or mother, or person. All too soon and all too easily I set them aside, because my enthusiasm simply fades or because I assume that “this will take care of itself.” When I realize that these things are actually work and demand something of me I let them fade from my vision; eventually they become just visual white noise, something that I look past without seeing, another part of the landscape. And I am the poorer for it. I suspect that taking the time to learn proper tomato care instead of watching another round of useless TV would in fact have yielded a bountiful harvest instead of a fight with leggy plants and few fruits. In the same way, sitting down to cross-stitch in the day or evening may yield not only a product that I’ve made and of which I’m proud, but also more time spent in conversation and a deeper relationship with my sons or husband. The book that I’ve stopped reading after 50 pages may contain that one thought of phrase that will carry me through many a rough day. But breaking out of the rut of malaise, I find, is a job in itself.

Too often I choose the easy way, and feel myself impoverished. I imagine and even know what I’m missing but find myself too mired in sloth to seize it. I regret these missed opportunities, and I feel a not-unnecessary guilt when I am reminded of “what might have been.” The challenge, I know, is to transform this guilt into action. It’s not too late for me right now, or ever, as long as I have breath, to begin again. I may scale back my expectations; I may change my strategy – such is life. But here is the beauty of life, and gardens: Spring planting will come again, offering another chance for a rich harvest.

Glory to God.