I made six jars of bread and butter pickles with cucumber from my garden this summer — the first time I’ve ever grown enough of something to preserve it. I gave two of them away, to friends whose enthusiasm for sweet pickles is proportionate to my enthusiasm for our friendship. I ate my way through three more — over burgers grilled on the porch, with black-eyed peas from the farmers market, straight from the jar in the interrogatory light of the refrigerator door.
Now I’m down to one pint jar, which I’m hoping will keep in the refrigerator until Thanksgiving. I’d hoped to get at least a pie’s worth of miniature pumpkins from the five vines I planted, but their destiny was thwarted by squash vine borer, the same agent of destruction that prevented all but one yellow crookneck from coming to fruition. You win some, you lose some.
I know. Writers shouldn’t get away with folksy platitudes like that, but we farmers certainly can. Check the Almanac.
The “farm” in my case was an irregular grid of containers and raised beds at the end of our driveway, the sunniest patch of land to be found amid the trees left standing when our midtown subdivision was carved out of the valley in the early 1950s. Back then, there were real farms nearby. The elderly lady from whom we bought the house recalled a stray cow wandering down the street shortly after she and her family moved into their brand new ranch-style home.
Besides an abundance of shade overhead, the dirt underfoot curtailed my homesteading. Beneath the thin layer of sod, it’s that backbreaking Arkansas mix of quartz crystals and siltstone, bound together with clay. Hence the cedar-wood raised bed, the milk crates, the clay flowerpots, the plastic planters, and makeshift trellises. Welcome to Hodge Podge Valley.
Still, I doubt any Plains pioneer ever doted and fretted over his vast acreage with more devotion than I paid to my 20 cubic feet of potting mix. Checking on the garden was the first thing I did every morning, sometimes before I got dressed. I’d step out for a quick inspection in my nightgown while the sun was still coming up and the streets empty. Then I’d still be out there, bra-less and bed-headed, crouched under the pepper plants, stalking a grasshopper, when the mailman came up the walk an hour later.
My 10-year-old boy and, eventually, my husband joined me on the family farm. My son was my partner from the beginning, planting seeds and watching vigilantly for enemy bugs. We exchanged news from the garden with breathless rapture and alarm. The corn has sprouted! The tomatoes have flowers! A weird beetle is on the beans! Something’s wrong with the pumpkins! There’s another cucumber!
My husband was skeptical at first. He’d seen me attempt gardening before, only to abandon the field when summer got too hot and the bugs proved to have a better work ethic than me. When he saw us planting corn, he scoffed openly. Corn grows in fields, he said. Not in a 4×4 box.
But my 4×4 box was a field of dreams, and as the stalks grew tall and close together, with tassels that dangled above his head, Patrick would stand beneath them and stare in wonder. “I’ll be damned,” he’d say. I don’t think he’d have been much more amazed if Shoeless Joe Jackson suddenly stepped out. If you build it …
He began to join me on my early morning inspections, and again in the evenings, two of us hovering over plants the way we used to over a sleeping baby. When something from the garden appeared at the table, he greeted it with enthusiasm and praise. And when the lone full ear of corn was harvested from the sixteen stalks, he was as thrilled and triumphant as I was.
It was a rare summer. It never did get too hot, and if I couldn’t vanquish my enemies, I held them mostly at bay. I fed my family food planted with my own hands (a satisfaction my 10-year-old got to share). My husband and I discovered that our pleasure in nurturing together extends beyond our kids and their swiftly passing childhood. My teens, too busy being teenagers to be directly involved in the garden, were nourished nonetheless by the edible harvest and the intangible one.
A rare summer, a sweet season in our life as a family. That pint jar in my refrigerator contains so much more than pickles. And when I open it at this year’s Thanksgiving table, I will be extra grateful.