When we put the seeds into the soil, I wasn't expecting much. I have a cactus that I love so dearly which I've kept alive for over a decade; I also routinely kill houseplants by overwatering them, neglecting their sun needs, and forgetting that they are living beings that need love and attention. My journey with houseplants has been full of fits and starts, of high hills and low valleys, that I assumed the veggie garden would be a distraction at best, but most likely a failure.
I come from gardeners on both sides: my grandfather tended beautiful flower gardens complete with water features and hand-built gazebos; my grandmother was the kind of gardener that casually grew corn in her backyard. But when I was a kid, I wasn't interested in gardening, either flora or vegetal. Gardening was squarely the purview of the elderly (people in their 50s), and wasn't nearly as captivating as things like, say, The Babysitter's Club. So I ignored it, the same way I ignored my mom's ability to reupholster furniture, or my dad's skills at grilling meat, and filed those skills away for "learning someday."
Turns out that "someday" is the beginning of the North American shutdown phase of a global pandemic. I am now fully an adult, so there's no "that's for old people" excuse; I'm also a person who routinely looks up advanced degrees in food preservation and foraging, so I definitely have the interest in where food comes from. Our food, most of the time, comes from big-box grocery stores (who else buys the Costco 12-pack of Annie's mac and cheese and then demolishes that inside of two months?); sometimes it comes from farmer's markets and 100-mile boutiques—the kind that sell artisan yogurts and heirloom squashes—but never before had it come from inside my own property line.
We started with everything. Fennel, beets, lettuces, tomatoes. Zucchini, pumpkin, eggplant, kale. Cauliflower, basil, pansies (you can eat them), peppers. As the seedlings came up indoors, we used the warm March and the stay-home orders to pull weeds and turn the soil, walking the perimeter to envision the space between plants. I repotted the sturdiest-looking seedlings and pinched off the others, dying a little as they did. The fennel got leggy and then died; the beets went into the ground and were promptly eaten by the bunnies (ditto the cauliflower, lettuce, and eggplant). The kale never really came up. I spent time on the internet searching things like "soil pH lettuce" and "can you hunt rabbits without a permit."
But the tomatoes! The zucchini! The pumpkins! Man alive, if you would like to feel a sense of power, grow a tomato; if you prefer terror, put eight tomato seedlings in the ground and then watch as they all do brilliantly, each bearing 30 or so tomatoes, no, more, 40, maybe 50. I have harvested at least five pounds of tomatoes each day for the last week. I've made salsa and tomato paste; next on the docket is tomato sauce and canned whole tomatoes. I've made zucchini pickle, bread, muffins, fritters and gratin. The pumpkins will be roasted and pureed and frozen, some as-is and others as enchilada sauce. The basil has been picked, tossed with tomatoes, brie, garlic and pasta, and made into a ridiculously easy 18-minute dinner. The garden is going so gangbusters that it's a little intimidating. I feel like Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors, only Audrey is 300 tomatoes and 45 kilos of zucchini. And she will be feeding me for the next few months, if I can make enough room in my freezer.
Canning was really my gateway drug into all of this. In 2017, I made a corn relish on a whim—out-of-season peppers, stale turmeric, frozen corn—and I was hooked. It was like little jewels conjured out of thin air, proof-positive that I was a wizard: take this perishable food and stop time. I made pickled carrots and hand-chopped relish, kimchi and pesto, raspberry jam and hot sauce. I wanted to transform it all, and with a Ball jar and a bit of perseverance, I could. Coming up with new projects—pickled pumpkin?—meant discovering new ingredients and new flavours, along with trying new ways to eat it.
But it's not just canning. It's food as an art form, something that can feel very structured and very free at the same time. I don't mean to get too conceptual about it—sometimes a sausage is just a sausage—and I'm certainly not the Thomas Keller type, the ones who invent new modes of gastronomica in order to use up yesterday's chard. I just really like trying new things—ingredients, cuisines, techniques, schools of thought—and seeing what I can do with them in a fairly well-appointed but decidedly middle-of-the-road home kitchen. I don't have a Kitchenaid or a gas stove, but I do have the internet and a zesty approach.
Growing a garden has also made me realize that I want this. I want a bit of land with some proper tomato stakes and some raised beds. I want a raspberry cane and a scaffold full of beans. But not only that: I want lupin and lilac, a smoke bush and all the hostas I can handle. I want something that will go dormant and then come alive, the way I seem to, year after year. And I can't really do that on a bit of rented yard. Those smoke bushes will never really be mine; the raspberry cane will one day be razed. It's another reason to feel not-quite-adult; don't adults have their own houses? And it's another thing to work towards in my 40s, if I want it.
When I put the seedlings into the ground, I felt very sure that all the work I had done to that point was about to be lost. I was not prepared for it to thrive, which is annoying—why did I underestimate myself? And where else do I do that? Gardens are a beautiful metaphor for so many things: fertility, femininity, cycles, rebirth, growth, knowledge, sustenance. They're also a ton of work. I shlepped buckets full of water and fertilizer, read many recipes, manhandled the earth with nothing more than a shovel and a pair of close-toed shoes. I had a goal—I am going to grow something in case COVID knocks out the food supply chain—and now I have a yard full of blushing tomatoes and a fridge full of zucchini. Mission accomplished. Now I want more.
