A Garden Long Ago

Day 259: When in my late 20s I married for the second time, I convinced my husband to let me tear up our suburban back yard to put in a vegetable garden. Togerher, we dug the sod by hand, screened out the larger rocks and worked in some fertilizer, and at that point, he decided gardening wasn't his cup of tea, turning over the tasks of planting and weeding to me. I have to admit I wasn't as dedicated to the task of pulling weeds as I would be today, but by mid-summer, the corn was shoulder-high, the squash had spread its leaves and vines, and the bush bean plants were in flower, shading out all but the most vigorous of the undesirables. No garden is complete without a few sunflowers, and mine soon towered over me. Then as now, they were grown specifically with birds in mind, and a good thing: they were so full of earwigs that after picking one or two heads for our own enjoyment, we abandoned any idea of keeping a few for human consumption. The soil proved too rocky to grow carrots, and the radishes were riddled by worms, but shallowly rooted crops kept us in fresh veg right up to the final zucchini. But my initial foray into growing produce was short-lived. The following year, we moved. The ground at our new abode was nothing but rocks, large and small, and although I eventually coaxed a few beans from it and some potatoes from a bedding of straw, the only thing which ever did well was a slip of Greek oregano I'd been given by a neighbour. It eventually covered a patch ten feet on a side, more determined than even the prairie grass and weeds.