Blue Jeans & Jelly Beans
My neighbor gestured toward the sack. "Can you use any more apples?" she asked. "We just don't know what to do with ours."
She's one of the real gardeners. The real gardeners are reaping the literal fruits of their labor this month. They have shared zucchini all summer long. They are still pulling the occasional tomato from a vine now. They have applesauce put up for the winter.
My grandparents were like that. No one could leave their house without a sack full of oranges or avocados. I always assumed I'd be able to grow food when I grew up, too.
Instead, I stand by and watch every spring as my husband and our kids do what passes for gardening at our house. It only consists of buying plants and popping them into containers on our patio, but never mind. The kids love it. They like shopping for the flowers. They eagerly snatch the tomatoes off our two little tomato plants as they turn red. They even help water it.
I'm glad they do such a good job, and I'm not complaining. I'm just feeling painfully inadequate here. I often dream of growing my own fruits and vegetables, of eating in the rhythm of the seasons. Then I generally sigh and go off to the farmers' market.
Now, I did do "gardening" once. I got hypnotized about 10 years ago by a Smith & Hawken catalog and was rendered helpless to resist dozens and dozens of bulbs. I spent two days on the little borders by our front walk, digging in gypsum, sprinkling fertilizer, and planting. I loved the blooms that came up in the spring - I still have a picture of my then 1-year-old son on the front step with a rainbow of flowers around him.
But the next season, I was faced with a tougher task: pulling the bulbs out after they had bloomed. That's what the books say to do. Apparently our winters here aren't cold enough to convince the tulips and things that they've been through real Dutch snows, so you need to take out the bulbs and refrigerate them for six weeks. After the chilling, you're supposed to plant them again, whereupon they bloom with renewed oomph.
Dig up over a hundred bulbs? Get the dirt off them? Give up half my refrigerator for six weeks, at the height of the Halloween and Thanksgiving cooking season? And then plant them all over again? The idea was patently ridiculous. I left them in the ground.
Next February, all the bulbs sprouted on time. Ha, I thought, take that, you garden editors. However, very few bore flowers. The next year, even fewer bloomed. The tall green leaves taunted me. If not for my sloth, they seemed to say, they would be bearing yellow daffodils and pink tulips. Instead, the whole neighborhood knew what a bad gardener I was.
There was one bulb species, however, that didn't mind my treatment. The muscari came up beautifully, with little flowers shaped like bunches of purple grapes. The next year, I noticed they had even multiplied slightly.
Well, I may be lazy, but I'm not stupid. I yanked out the underperforming narcissus, and stuck a couple of hundred muscari in their place. Then I repeated my winning strategy and ignored them completely. They have come up every year since.
Yes, someday I will learn to be a real gardener and grow food. Until then, thank goodness for the grape flowers.
Passarelli is a mother of three and frequents farmers' markets regularly.