How Does Your Garden Grow? Always With Hope for Summer!

“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.”

--Francis Bacon, 1625, Essays

I have no green thumb, nor green fingers either, though as I prepare to plant my first vegetable and flower garden in many years next weekend, I’m hoping this season my efforts will produce abundance. Juicy, red tomatoes in late August; succulent, green lettuce leaves, maybe by July’s end; snap peas and green beans to grace my table, steamed and then covered in melting butter. And to symbolize my hoped for gardening success, I’ll also plant three or four sunflowers, those oversized black and yellow giants that reach up to the skies with such speed and fervor.

All gardeners, pros and amateurs alike, dream of their personal gardens of Eden: plants that grow true and tall and healthy. Vines that crawl without hindrance. Green stalks that climb like Jack’s beanstalk.  Bright, technicolor flowers that frame the garden, make it just so, a green and color filled space to work at and to enjoy on a long summer’s day.

How does your garden grow? Mine? Well, this year, we will see.

The last time I attempted to grow a garden, a mini-garden really, was in a small space right off my screened in back porch, a brown rectangle of dirt that catches full sun for much of the day. I went compact, intentionally, rationalizing that if the plants succumbed to critters or to blight or to too much water or too little water, my disappointment might be compact as well.  That’s the risk and the mystery and the adventure of home gardening. We always might just have our gardening hearts broken.  

All gardens, like life itself, are acts of hope, natural prayers of faith, offered by human hands covered in dirt. You never know what the outcome will be: one year a garden of Eden, the next a dust bowl. But still the gardener must garden. It’s what he does, what she does, what we can do too, perhaps to somehow remind ourselves that humans came from the dirt, that in the creation story from the Bible, it is written: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." At life’s end we go back to that soil, earth to earth and dust to dust. Maybe that’s why so many of us work the earth: to hear the ancient echo of our own creations, where we came from, where we return to.   

And so, on that Memorial Day weekend five springs ago, I planted five tomato plants I’d bought at the local big box garden center. I watered them faithfully, pinched back the suckers to push them to grow up and not out. I flicked off the occasional bug that gnawed at those delicate leaves.  I looked at my budding garden with increasing pride as June came to an end and then July 4^th burst forth and by the end of that month, little green fruits appeared! I might just make it!

Then tragedy struck. Taking my morning coffee out to the porch, I looked to the garden as I did every day, and waited for that feeling of pride but…it was not to be.  Sometime in the evening, the deer had come, treating my back yard like a salad bar, and so, like thieves in the dark, they nibbled and bit and stripped back all of my plants, every last tomato fruit consumed.  The plants stood denuded, bare, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Damn you, Bambi!

This year I will plant again, in spite of my PTSD: Plant Tomato Somehow Destroyed.  I garden this year, in part, to take my mind off the pandemic. I’m pretty sure I will have lots of time on my hands this summer. Plants I’ve grown from seed are thriving in my sunny bay window at the front of the house. This Saturday I will build a raised bed container garden, and then fill it up with 18 bags of rich and dark soil and then with care and tenderness, transplant my homegrown veggies and flowers. My menu of hope this year includes tomatoes, lettuce, melon, snap peas, green beans, zinnias and of course, those gaudy sunflowers.

Yes, I know it might not turn out so well, the story of my 2020 garden. The deer might come back for a second helping. The summer might be too dry or too wet. The skies might open up with hail to pummel the plants or rushing winds to topple the sunflowers.  Rabbits might ravenously chow down.   

Who knows?  

But still: I must garden. Still, I dare to dream of a summer harvest.  Still, I must hope, for in the seed is always the possibility of life: amazing, wonderful, miraculous, beautiful, green life. 

Thank you creation. Thank you creator God.