Over the weekend I did something I never do: I gardened. Although my mother (pictured at left tending to her beautiful hydrangeas) has quite the green thumb and also holds the esteemed title of Master Gardener (no, seriously, it's a real thing!), I seem to have been born without the gene because I hate...Gardening. Let's see...dirt under my fingernails, check. Grime, sun, and sunscreen creating a mudslide on my face, check. Every manner of insect buzzing about my head, check. Bags of worm casings, bat poop, egg shells, and ground up fish attacking my every sense, check, check, check, and check. Wait, remind me, why is fun again? I rest my case. Seriously though, there is nothing I would like to do less then spend my time on a beautiful day out wading in dirt. If I'm going to get dirty in the warm California sun it's going to involve a football, some beer, a bikini, and a lot of serious sun worshiping; not coveralls, cow poop, and a garden trowel. It is extremely hard to get a good tan in coveralls. Not only that, but once you plant all your pretty veggies and flowers there's even more work to be done, and I can barely remember to water the darn things! I think that this is largely because unlike my dog or my boyfriend, plants don't audibly complain when you don't take care of them. The squeaky wheel gets the oil in my house, so unless broccoli plants develop a distinctive cry when they need to be tended, I think I'm SOL. I tried having indoor plants in college; I even picked an ivy vine for my first foray into gardening because I figured, "It's a weed, how can I kill it?" Well, I did the impossible, I can't even keep naturally occurring pest plants alive; the ivy was dead within three months. Additionally, gardening is a never ending commitment; it requires hard work, dedication, and time, and since I'm already in a serious relationship, two just seems like a stretch (even for someone as enterprising as myself). If you don't keep at a garden it gets attacked by secret gopher squadrons, nibbled on by roaming deer, suffocated by invasive weeds, and crippled merely from lack of pruning; it just seems more like a war zone than a hobby.
at the same time, however, the end result of a garden is nothing short of a fruit and vegetable revelation which means that though I don't want to do the work of gardening I love...
Fresh Fruits and Veggies Straight from the Vine. Being in my mother's garden is like being in an enchanted forest: roses of every shade bloom everywhere, sunflowers greet each new day, broccoli of prehistoric sizes shoot from large planter boxes, tomatoes seem to ripen before your very eyes, and towering green bean stalks threaten to disappear into the clouds. Watching my mother in her garden is just as enchanting as the place itself: it's like watching an enthusiastic conductor with his orchestra: her plants seem to grow prolifically in her presence. Although I have seen this many times, I still don't particularly know what goes down in this magical garden behind the scenes, one moment I am watching mommy wend a tomato vine through its allocated trellis, and the next she will produce a fresh, perfect bean from nowhere, "Green Bean?" She will ask. And as I eagerly take the bean and pop it in my mouth, I think not only of how lucky I am to have such a horticulturaly inclined mother, but also how positively scrumptious a veggie plucked at the height of its readiness can be. It is at these moments that I wish that I had a garden like this: need a fresh pepper from for the evening's dinner? No problem, I will go pick one for the garden! Fancy some lettuce for a light lunch? Hold on a moment, let me flit into the garden and harvest some! When you love to incorporate fresh fruits and vegetables into your meals as much as I do, a garden at one's finger tips is a blessing almost too wonderful to imagine. So despite my hatred of getting dirty, or my previous inability to keep a plant alive long enough to produce edible food, fresh veggies or herbs in my own back-yard may be a luxury worth working for.
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