like Jack and the Beanstalk...only not

I’m not much of a gardener. I mean, I have tried many times to plant and care for a garden which I suppose means I am dedicated, but I have yet to succeed in actually making anything grow. This, of course makes me very frustrated so that the next rainy season I try even harder and work even longer to find out and fix whatever’s wrong with what I was doing.

I have tried many things. I’ve watered it every spare moment of every day to see if water-lackage is the problem, but that just ended up drowning every living thing down to the smallest weed. I’ve composted the ground first, which attracted snakes. I’ve planted it in the shade, where the sun-loving plants shriveled. Then I planted it in the sun, which sucked ever nutrient out of the ground and burned every sprig of life up till nothing but thorns covered the dry ground.  I’ve experimented with different seeds only to discover that every seed package I had in my possession, had expired at least four years ago. I even found some tomato seeds that expired in September of 1995. Where did those come from?

So this past year, we decided that to try moving the garden to a completely different area where there had not been a garden since long before we moved here. It was part in the sun and part in the shade and was relatively flat and nothing else productive was being done with that specific patch of ground, so it seemed like a good idea. Mom, Josh, James and I collectively marked out the ground and built a fence of tree branches and chicken wire. Then we got out our two half-broken hoes and James and I set to work. I nearly killed myself trying to get the metal to dent the rock hard ground. So we waited a month and a half until it rained. Then we practically wrenched our arms out of their sockets as we discovered that the ground had the consistency of clay and stuck to the head of the hoe so that as you lifted it up over your head, huge clods of mud would come with it and consequently fall on your head, or fly back and hit Josh in the stomach at which point all work would cease and the whole thing would turn into a huge mud fight. We must’ve looked pretty funny, dancing around the “field”, moving as fast as tortoises while using the effort of the fastest hare to slog through the sticky mud, clay shoeing our feet and clothing our clothes.

Meanwhile, Mom randomly scattered a few pumpkin seeds on the other side of the compound without hope of much. Like Jack chucking the magic beans out his window.

Two months, third degree sunburns , four billion blisters, and five hundred kazillion hours of frustration later, a carefully prepared, organized, planted, replanted and re-replanted garden sat out in the baking sun…all of its neat lines and heaps and markings looking beautiful. When it rained, it looked like a melted ice tray with its stripes and plaids of little lakes here and there. The symmetry was killing me. At this point I was very frustrated with the fact that all it was was neatly arranged piles of dirt and that any plant life was gone. The cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant and green peppers had just not grown at all.  The corn had grown to a foot high, tasseled and then produced tiny cobs of corn (one kernel per cob). They were ultimately felled by termites. So the only things growing were about a fourth of the beans I had originally planted and random stalks of sorghum which I had not planted at all and just kind of appeared.

Then we went to the States for six weeks. Then we returned. The beans in the garden had shriveled up and died. The sorghum was ten feet high. Out of all the herbs planted, the dill was the only one that had survived (the only herb I have no clue what to do with had thrived to bush height). Nothing else in the garden looked even remotely alive. But way over in the far end of the compound, a forest of pumpkins towered over my tiny little garden, the vast shadow cast by its accomplishments eclipsing my formerly triumphant dill bush. I keep wondering if there are any magic harps or geese laying the golden eggs hidden under the huge umbrella-like leaves. Joyce had piled all the pumpkins she’d harvested while we were gone on our porch. There were 53 in all. I guess Mom has the green thumb.

 There are pumpkins piled and heaped in random places all around the house like under the bookshelves in the hallway and behind the dumbbells in Dad’s office. You can’t go anywhere without bumping into the golden devils. So I guess we’ll be eating pumpkin soup for a while. Flavored with…dill?