GARDENING | MEMORIES

My Life As A Gardener

It all started with my Grandma.

Despite the fact that this article talks about my gardening history, I mostly started it as a tribute to my Grandma. I wanted to honor her contribution to the part of my life where I wear the ‘gardener’ hat. My Grandma and I had a bond through gardening and it goes way back to some of my earliest memories of her.

It was my first time away from my parents for a long period of time. It was 1981 and they were traveling to China for a month, so they shipped me off to stay with my Grandmother. I was 4 years old.

I actually flew solo on a plane to see her! Yes, the airlines allowed children to fly by themselves back in those good ol’ days. I don’t think that happens anymore?

Or does it?

It was only a 30-minute flight from Calgary to Medicine Hat, in Alberta, Canada, and my Grandma was waiting for me on the other side.

I don’t know if my Grandma had the summer off, or how she managed me there for a month, but I sure spent a lot of time with her.

The most significant thing that I remember from that summer was how much time we spent in the garden. I remember digging potatoes and playing with worms. We picked peas and ate them right from the shell. I was shown how to plant seeds and how to move plants around. She had lots of strawberries and they were so delicious.

But the one thing I remember the most was her tomatoes. There was something about those tomatoes and my grandmother that just went together.

In fact, throughout my life, the smell of a tomato plant makes me think of my grandma every-single-time, and I am sure that it all started there.

In later years, my Grandma moved to my town. Of course, in no time at all she had a garden plot started and she was always growing something.

Friends would tell me that whenever they stopped by her house, for whatever reason, she was always ass up in the garden. She had incredible flexibility and could simply bend at the waist and weed, pull, and garden to her heart's content.

She cooked MANY amazing meals for our family from that garden. And of course, she always had tomato plants growing.

It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I started to become interested in growing my own food. I was now living on the West Coast of Canada and had been for about 5 years at that point. The climate in that part of the country is very mild, and you can actually grow certain foods year-round if you do it right.

That year, my then-husband and I got a caretaking position at a farm that raised sheep. The owner had a huge garden on the property, but she claimed that she hadn’t planted it in a few years because the last caretakers didn’t want to help, and it was too much work for her alone.

She asked me if I was interested in helping, and I had to admit that I hadn’t had much experience growing vegetables, but I was eager to learn.

Well, despite the fact that the owner turned out to be super high maintenance and impossible to please, she did teach me a hell of a lot about growing food and preserving it. We canned in her kitchen, picked weeds together, and shared in the abundance that the garden provided us.

But I still remember smelling the tomatoes and thinking about Grandma.

Of course, when I told Grandma that I was growing a garden she was over the moon with excitement.

“Ooooohhhhhh what all are you growing?” she would ask each time we spoke.

She was also very excited that I was living on a farm! Being a farmgirl from Saskatchewan (in central Canada) herself, she just loved that thought. This farm was a little different than the one she grew up on, though, as it was 11 acres of rolling pastureland nestled right on the coast of the Salish Sea. Along our shore was a rocky tidal zone, and quite often we would find ourselves either down in the garden or out on the beach watching the sunset send the skies into a stunning visual art display for us to enjoy.

It is certainly one of the most beautiful places that I have ever lived.

Whenever I would call her to chat, she had questions about the garden. She always wanted to know what I was growing in there and would ask things like, “How are your potatoes doing?” Of course, by then, she had had to give up on her own garden as she was now living in a seniors home.

I think she enjoyed living vicariously through me.

We only lasted 2 years at the farm and had a very tumultuous time of it. Our marriage was on the rocks, the owner was playing narcissistic tricks on us, and it was all a bit much. So we moved on.

I didn’t grow a garden after that for a few years. My marriage did end and I was finding my way in the world on my own. At one point I think I planted some basil, but that was about the extent of it.

It wasn’t until I was moved into my own house, which had a huge expanse of a back yard that I started to dream of a garden again. Just about as soon as I started dreaming about it, my partner Chris came into my life. With him came numerous outdoor potted plants that he had been carting around with him, through various moves, for 7 years, plus a wealth of plant and garden experience.

One day we started digging his plants into my backyard.

It was then that I realized that he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon:)

As our relationship grew that first summer, so did our garden. We both absolutely LOVED anything to do with gardening. Together we would spend much of our free time, landscaping the yard, building soil, planting food, and preserving what we could.

It was so much work but we relished it.

Over the course of 4 summers, we turned a rectangle of grass into a stunning garden oasis. It was our creative project, and we adored it.

Chris had his own landscaping company, and surprisingly many of his clients would want plants dug up from their yards. Without fail, he brought each and every one of them home and put them in our yard somewhere. Many times the plants that he dug up were pronounced dead by his clients but he would move them into our yard, and they would be thriving in no time. He also would take seeds from flower seed heads that he would see, and would sprinkle them around the yard.

One day while we were out admiring our work, I turned to him and said,

“Thank you for planting your plants in my yard.”

He laughed and said back,

“Thank you for having a yard for me to plant them in.”

We built a couple of simple greenhouses on the property, one of which is known as a ‘walapini’. It’s a South American invention and is basically a greenhouse that is sunk into the earth at least 4 feet (1.3m) which accesses geothermal heat that comes from the ground.

We planted numerous tomato plants in that greenhouse and it produced like crazy. We would pick tomatoes until November.

Every time we went in there I would smell the tomatoes and think, of Grandma.

Our garden truly was our oasis. In the summers we would stay out just sitting in the yard or doing some maintenance on it until it was so dark we couldn’t see anymore. We spent much time examining what was growing, moving plants around, and sculpting the land. Bear in mind that Canadian summer nights are light out until 9:30 and later.

When I came up with the idea for us to sell all of our things and travel full time, Chris’ first response was “But what about my plants and the garden?” It was a gut response that demonstrated just how important it was to him, to us.

Thankfully our house was sold to the absolute perfect buyers, who truly appreciated the work we had put into the garden, landscaping, and the soil.

Of course, throughout our travels, we have now seen hundreds of gardens and we relish the plants that grow in specific parts of the world, specifically in the tropics. Despite being in a few locations for a few months at a time, the only place that we really were able to get into gardening again was when we were in Kikorongo, Uganda last year (2021).

We initially went there to paint murals, but we ended up getting heavily involved with the local community. Part of what we were helping people with, was to demonstrate small-scale kitchen gardening. Most of them don’t have small gardens as they are more concerned with large-scale farming.

We also started teaching them about composting and soil building. We had numerous demonstration piles both where we were staying, and at a community garden in the village that we also started.

Of course, with all this excitement going on, we couldn’t help but also plant our own vegetable garden. We didn’t know how long we would be there, but we knew that it would get eaten after we left anyways.

We ended up staying in the area for 6 months and did a lot of landscaping around our accommodation as well. It was all a labor of love and we were so happy to have the chance to work with the land again.

It had been a while.

At the tail end of our stay in Uganda last November, I got word that my Grandma had fallen and broken her hip. Now, we all know what that can typically mean, especially when a person is 96 years old. They were going to try hip surgery on her, but her heart couldn’t take the anesthesia.

My Dad emailed me the phone number for the hospital where she was staying in Calgary. When she answered the phone she sounded so confused. I wasn’t even sure if she knew who I was.

I said, “I hear you had an accident.”

“What accident?” She asked.

“Well, you fell and broke your hip,” I said a bit confused.

“Oh yeah……”. She sort of trailed off and mumbled a bunch of nonsensical things. I wasn’t sure how this conversation was going to go.

Then suddenly I looked down. I was standing right next to some beautiful tomato plants that were packed with tomatoes about to ripen.

“Guess what Grandma. I planted a garden here in Uganda.”

“Ooooooooh you DID? What all have you planted?”

Just like that, she snapped out of wherever she had been when I first called, and I had her. I just had to mention the garden, and that was enough for her to come to her senses.

Suddenly she needed to ask all the questions.

I told her all the things that we had planted, and we chatted a bit about different things that we weren’t able to grow there because it is too hot. She was interested, intrigued, and very alive.

That was the last time I spoke to her.

Just recently I realized that my life with my Grandmother started with her and her tomatoes, and at the end of her life, there they were again. It was as if all the knowledge she had imparted to me through the years had manifested itself in that profound moment.

The next day as I was working in the garden, a stunning butterfly landed next to me. I took some photos of it, expecting it to fly away at any moment. But it hung out for a few hours and didn’t go far. Although my grandma hadn’t passed yet, at that point, I like to think that it was a piece of her spirit that was sent to inspect my garden.

She always was such a curious soul.

My parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles sent my Grandmothers ashes off this past weekend, back in Canada. My Dad asked me to write the eulogy, which helped me to feel like I was there and a part of it.

Being so far away is certainly difficult in these times, but I’m so happy that modern technology allowed me to at least talk to my grandmother one last time.

It couldn’t have been a more perfect way for me to say goodbye to her.

I hope that wherever she finds herself these days, she is surrounded by mountains of plants, unending scratch tickets, and a vast garden that she can tend to.

There, I know, is where she will be the happiest.

Hi there, we are 2 Canadians, Jill and Chris from Artistic Voyages. We have been nomadic since 2017 living in numerous different countries, and experiencing the life and diversity of our planet on the ground and firsthand. We have now been on the African continent for over 2 years!

Subscribe to Medium through my referral link to get full access to my writing plus thousands of others! Plus sign up here to get my articles by email!

Join our adventure by hitting the links below!

Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Patreon| YouTube | Medium