How to Fall in Love With Gardening

2020 can be the year you begin your love affair with growing food.

We will remember 2020. Kinda like a nightmare! But at least one exciting thing happened. More people began to understand how important it is to grow food. The global bum-wipe shortage triggered fears of a failure in the food chain and OMGoodness, “What will we eat?”

While in the store, seeking necessities for my bum, I did a big eye-rolling rubber face expression as I noticed empty shelves of rice and beans.

Wiped clean! But do people know how to cook beans and rice? The spice aisle was stocked. Okay, they’d be eating bland rice and beans.

The doom-mongering preppers were seeming like the folks who were right all along. Besides stockpiling beans and rice, the need to grow our own food became more relevant. Most of us can’t grow rice or enough beans to feed our family, but we could grow veggies, fruit, and hemp for homemade wipes!

The panic! “I better grow food,” they thought.

Then a sobering reality set in. “How do I grow food?” Gardening videos started popping up like rows of spring peas.

• Options
• Channel surfing
• Stores not selling seeds
• Organic
• Chemical fertilizers
• Weeds
• Weeds
• Oh my god! Weeds!
• Sets
• Seeds
• Worm casting
• Garden books
• The library is closed! What will I do?

Here is where I step in.

There are many resources to teach you how to garden, but for success over time, you must fall in love. Love makes a relationship and gardening is, first, a relationship. You must fall in love and fall in love over and over again.

Oh, I could teach you about cooking beans, but my special touch is gardening and how I cultivated my 52-year love affair with growing my food. Over the years I’ve had large backyard gardens, a small farm, and now I have a small yard and driveway container garden. My home is also full of plants, herbs, and food.

Every day of the year I have something to eat and drink grown in my little garden.

How did it begin?

I grew up in cities. The biggest one was Phoenix, Arizona. I’d not been in a garden. Then one day, when I was a young mother, my husband and I and our little boy lived in a mobile home park in Iowa. Our home was always filled with children doing crafts and playing games.

One day, one of the children’s moms called and asked, “Do you want some cukes?”

“Cukes?” I questioned.

“You know, cucumbers?” I’m a veggie nut, so I replied, “Oh, yes! Thank you.”

“Great, we’re going away for the weekend and there are a lot of cucumbers that need picking. Come over and help yourself. Be sure to pick anything with any size. Take anything else you want while you’re at it.” So, she was- not going to bring me a bag of cucumbers, okay.

“Thanks, Judy.” Wow, I remember her name.

As I hung up the phone I was kinda in shock. Okay, so where was her garden, and what does she mean by, “Take anything else”?

“Pick any with any size,” hmm, what does that mean? How will I know? Should I just pick them all?

What if I pick them all and it was too many or more than she wanted me to pick?

It was feeling like pressure. What if I did it all wrong? Kinda like a blind date, right? Oh my, do people still do blind dates?

Well, I’ll just do it.

The story of how I fell in love.

It was a bright Saturday morning when I meandered down the trailer park road to Judy’s house. When I saw the vine-covered entrance, I figured I’d found her garden.

Rocks pressed into my feet and reminded me to get onto the path. The scent of lemon clung to me as I brushed past lime green plants nestled alongside the entrance.

Grapes! I reached up to grab a bunch of the deep purple grapes that hung from the arch, welcoming me into my neighbor’s garden.

My hot-pink-painted toes found their way to the warm earth as I took that first step into what I thought must be Eden.

Greens of every shade and tall stalks of corn. Plump ears of corn peeked from behind big leaves of some vine growing up and arching from stalk to stalk.

A new fragrance filled the air as I walked with slow steps among the plants. I smelled a mingled scent I couldn’t identify but found pleasant.

Tidy rows of beans, carrots, onions, and marigolds — marigolds. Marigolds in a vegetable garden? A carpet of lush leaves flowed all about here and there among the marching rows.

Following a row of caged tomato plants full of bright red fruit, I reached a wooden table topped with rows of jars. Their contents seeming to bubble. On the ground, next to the table, was an old black cauldron of a type my grandmother used for boiling; not soap or laundry. What was it she boiled?

Peppers! I picked a large dark green pepper and took a bite of the crisp wet flesh. Not finding anywhere to toss the core, I stuffed it in my gathering sack. I gathered a few more peppers and put them in my bag as I moved through the rows of different-shaped peppers until I was in the center of the garden.

There I stood, my feet on the silken soil. Looking about in awe, I breathed in the air of many scents.

Taking a picture with my mind’s eye to remember the mix of colors. I smiled as my hot-pink-painted toes rubbed against a large purple fruit. Eggplant, it was eggplant.

I stood.

I stood among the shapes and shades of green — feeling.

Two birds fought over space in a birdbath.

I don’t remember the walk home, but I still remember the sights and smells. And most of all, the feelings conjured that day when I fell deeply in love with a garden.

Thus began my love affair.

Let’s take apart my story to discover how I fell in love?

1) Notice I did not bring home any cucumber, haha. That’s another story.

2) I had a sense of wonder or excitement as we do when we go on a first date.

3) I was fully present.

4) I looked purposefully and with wonder.

5) There were many fragrances, some of which I could not identify.

6) The colors from the shades of green to the bright fruit were tied to me like my hot-pink toes.

7) It teased me. The jars filling the wooden table added curiosity.

This is the shortlist. What did you notice that I didn’t list?

Life prepares us for our first in-love experience.

Those things we observe within our families and among our friends set a stage for what we think love is. The gradual accumulation of preference we collect when watching movies, reading books, and listening to love songs helps guide us to that moment when we feel it — we’re in love.

For me, falling in love with gardening was similar. I’d not learned to garden in my family, but I loved vegetables, shapes, colors, lovely scents, and simple things. The earth, the smell of earth, and the wind flowing through leaves exhilarated me, always. Looking back, that experience in a garden was the ideal stage for me to fall in love.

How can my experience help you?

2020 has triggered a desire to grow food, however, the harvest is only part of the garden experience. Well, it’s a big part, but it takes a bit to get to where you’re filling bushel baskets with produce. Think about what touches your emotions. Think about my experience. Is there anything there that reaches you?

• Gardening is an adventure. What inspires you?
• Whether one plant in a container or a half-acre plot, we need to take time to enjoy the experience fully. Sit for five minutes and remember a pleasant experience.
• As with people, we must look deeply to be fully appreciative. Think about what attracts you to those you love.
• As in our relationships, we must take time to notice all the signals sent our way.
• One rule of gardening is to paint your toes. That’s another story. I find plants like humor. It’s a good thing.
• What was in the jars? Gardening is about growing plants, but also about using what we grow. Growing, preparing, and preserving our harvest is all part of the same experience.
• Make a list of all the vegetables, flowers, and herbs you would like to grow.

That list is a beginning. We all have unique preferences. I mostly eat vegetables, but I could purchase what I need to from the farmer’s market. Gardening is a rich, full-body experience. Noticing those things we enjoy about our plants gives us the desire to spend time and do the work.

Your assignment, should you accept it?

Drive around your neighborhood and look at gardens. Watch YouTube videos of gardens. Look and see and think about what draws you in. Is it the color? Is it the texture? How important is a fragrance to you?

Get a notebook and start brainstorming what you would like to grow. Start gathering resources.

This year brought unique challenges and suffering, but it also triggered the desire to heal ourselves with nutritious homegrown food. In doing this, we heal our earth.

Thank you for visiting my simple word garden. You can send gardening and simple living questions to [email protected]. I’m delighted you stopped by and please come again. Katie

I tend plants and people from my 120-year-old home and small garden. I see strength in the injured spirit and find significance in the insignificant.