Nancy's Garden

I've always grown tomato plants. When I was a kid, I had one or two planted next to the pool. I constantly got swamped with chlorinated water, which didn't seem to hurt it any. The plants still produced great tomatoes. Of course that was in Spokane, where it is very hot in the summer and the tomatoe plants thrive on heat. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the dampness does them in. They can easily subcomb to the blight. I put in two plants just last week. It's been so cold, on of the other community gardeners said it was cruelty to plants. I however, lost 12 plants to frost once in Yakima. They just grew back stronger.

I am sort of a romantic when it comes to gardening and love the country garden look. I attempted to pull it off at my last house, but then I was in graduate school and my cat died. And then my marriage failed. Now I'm getting divorced and gardening by myself in Fairhaven. A woman I used to know might say about my state of affairs, I'm just having a streak of bad luck. But really, although it's been exceptionally hard for the last three years, so hard I could take up singing country music, I am sort of falling in love with my new life. I'm really feel so free. And my garden mirror's that freedom, don't you think? I think so.

The last house I lived in overlooked the water. I had a wonderful Victorian garden, designed to hide the Glendon--waste disposal system-- with sprays of irises and daisies and glads and of course, wild blackberries. They grow all over the place here in the Pacific Northwest. Not part of our natural habitat, so they are considered a noxious weed list. Someone told me when I first moved from the East side of the state, to never cultivate them. I was just happy to pick them in the fall, giant blackberries, more than I'd seen in all my life. But the ones in my Victorian garden are the tiny indigenous blackberry. The are very delicious and good to find.

Today I dug up about 24 square feet of my garden. I was talking to my neighbor while I turned the soil over with a shovel. She was weeding and putting in a few pea transplants. We were discussing the community garden and how nice it was to have a place away from our homes to come. I live in a condo with cement all around, so this community garden really is my yard. It is lined with plum trees and rhubarb plants and peonies. There's a shared tool shed and a picnic table. It's a good place to come to play with my grandbaby. It's private on one street side, on the other, which is more like an alley, there are houses--where participating gardeners live. Some of the folks have been gardening in this community garden for 20 years or more--about the length of my marriage.

I'm the new comer to this community garden--my neighbor is actually newer than me, since I started last spring--and I'm perhaps one of the worse gardeners of all the 10x20 plots. Not that I want to be a bad gardener. But I probably garden like I do the rest of my life. I loose control of stuff, piles of papers, unfolded laundry, dirty dishes. I'm embarrassed to say this, but I'm messy. And so is my garden. But oh well. It is perhaps one of my lessons this life for me. Just let things be what they are. Don't try to control things too much--maybe I wouldn't have stayed in a bad marriage so long if I'd followed the garden's advice. Just be what I am--truly myself.