My Little Green World

I usually plant peas around St. Patrick’s Day.  Our little veggie garden and greenhouse will pump out a surprising number of vegetables over the entire growing season.  Almost every day in the summer I can fill a bowl with an array of cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, basil, lettuce or carrots.   This is satisfying on its own, but in addition, the garden teaches me little lessons, like it is a microcosm of the larger world.

Many more people farmed a hundred years ago than now, including it seems, all my Mennonite ancestors.  Even so, I don’t think I inherited a green thumb.  I would even say I was terrible at gardening to start – doing way more work than needed for little or no return.  However, if you stubbornly stick with an interest for long enough, eventually something will come out of it.  After many years of trial and much error, I can finally grow bunches of spinach or fist sized beets.  Also, my husband installed slow-drip irrigation, which has been a game changer in our well-drained soil.

Since I work mostly at home, I visit the garden during breaks.  In little spurts of time, I can pick, pull weeds, plant a few more seeds or thin plants. While I’m there, I marvel at how a single tiny seed can produce a giant plant, like a zucchini.  Seeds and plants want to grow and will try their best within the conditions given.  If I provide them with fertile soil, irrigation and sunlight, they will be happy and more productive than if struggling in a less-than-ideal spot or conditions.   Like people, plants are designed to grow and want to realize their full self.

However, sometimes the garden will take a hit.  An intense spring hailstorm that scars and damages young seedlings, a heat dome that cooks the spinach while it is alive or slugs that climb up a baby sunflower and eat it top down.  These things are out of my control.  But often, unless the plant is destroyed, they are just setbacks and life goes on.  By gardening, you are caught in the play between attachment and letting go.

And like in life, or in art, once the garden is more established, it becomes a lot easier.  As you get older, you just get smarter as you have so much experience behind you to draw from.   In the garden, over time you may get volunteer lettuce or sunflowers that often thrive better than the ones that you planted.  The soil is deep and alive after years of adding compost.

The garden is my own little world where I learn many lessons, such as how to grow carrots, but also that life has its cycles, and a seed is a miracle.  It also helps me practise patience as I learn that nature has its own time frame and its own wisdom – I am not the smartest one there.

In late summer, this small, fenced square of ground, starts to remind me of A.Y. Jackson’s painting, The Tangled Garden.  As I pull a giant parsnip under the shadow of a giant sunflower or admire blasts of colour from the zinnias while getting dive-bombed by a hummingbird, I feel I am on a stage full of different characters on which I am just playing a part.

Image above:  A.Y. Jackson, Tangled Garden (I had the chance to admire this original at the Vancouver Art Gallery during a Group of Seven exhibition).