TThe long, hot days of August are mostly behind us now, and here in Chicago we have about a month left to spend in the garden before the first frost hits. I moved into a house—with a garden!—two summers ago, but the first summer was spent in an exhausted post-move haze, and last summer was spent on the road, so the garden part remained neglected, except for a few scrawny, half-hearted tomatoes.
I grew up in a house with a fenced-off vegetable garden and a compost pile we raked leaves into, and I remember planting and harvesting vegetables, cosmos and sunflowers taller than my head, sweet peas and beans climbing up a trellis. Then we moved to Texas (unbearably hot), and I moved to New York (no outdoor space), Boston (more broken glass and rocks than usable space), and an apartment in Chicago (enough light for a houseplant garden, but no outdoor space). Now, this house and this summer are the first time since I was a kid that I’ve been able to experience an entire growing season outside and take care of it myself. I’m no novice, but in many ways, I don’t really know what I’m doing either.
The first few days of gardening are hard work and exciting – you’re weeding, watering and observing, but also noticing new leaves and vines, discovering new little shoots, sweating the prep work like soil improvement, bed planning and sowing. And then there’s a long, slow phase when your seeds sprout and do what they’re supposed to do: unfold, store enough sunlight, water and nutrients to produce sugars or proteins in the form of flowers and seeds, and follow their biological imperative. You can’t rush them, and after all the excitement and prep, there’s nothing left to do but just watch.
After the active, dirty weeks of preparation and planting, it feels like hitting the brakes. The first three or four leaves are exciting; after that, it gets hard to gauge whether the corn stalks are really getting bigger, whether the marigolds are setting. You look at your seedlings and the date of the first frost and try to calculate how many tomatoes or beans or whatever you can expect before it all dies off for the season. It’s a lot of hassle and a lot of maintenance, but the middle of a season sometimes feels helpless and slow.
And that’s life. It’s been a great few years in my house—any house, really, if you count surviving the worst of the pandemic and trying to figure out what a new normal might look like. On top of that, my husband and I just finished major projects—mine defined the second half of my 20s, his the culmination of a job he’s had since he was a teenager—and now we’re sitting in the long aftermath of those efforts, tired from work, waiting to see if they bear fruit. We’re pottering around, maintaining things, tweaking here and there, but we also feel like neither of us has anything to do, the slow inertia of midsummer setting in. It’s not quite time to think about next season, to talk about new plans in anything but the most abstract terms, but most of this season is over. I guess we could call it a time of rest.
It’s not all the quiet of the dead of winter – there’s a lot to do in a garden between planting and harvest time – but this work is the daily maintenance work of staying alive, keeping things in order, avoiding bad habits and the like. If you’re used to building things up and looking at them in the big picture, this kind of work can seem insignificant. Big things may still happen, but they’re often out of your sight, seeming slow or insignificant or invisible until they’re not. Either way, it’s out of your hands.
This is a hard lesson to learn. If I cared so much about a seed I planted growing into a mature pumpkin in my own garden, you would think that I could ensure that outcome, that I could only achieve it through my strong desire. Instead, I spent most of the summer outsmarting the woodlice that seemed intent on devouring many of the things in my garden as soon as they appeared. I also ended up building an improvised trellis, since the three-sister system I thought would give the beans support not only caused the beanstalks to climb up the cornstalks, but quickly overtook them and tangled up with each other. Earlier this spring, I mistook a hemlock for a fern that I half-remember planting in the fall. I waited until it was waist-high before pulling it up, taproot and all, in full protective gear. Then I found that it had almost choked out a bleeding heart plant that I had chosen because it reminded me of my first garden as a child. Challenges that seem small can be devastating; new plans and support must be put in place; you let things go in the wrong direction for a while. It may not seem exciting, but it is important work to keep these things under control.
And now it’s almost September, and all the daily work is bearing fruit. I can put meals on the table that I’ve nurtured from seed to dish; I can snack on the plants growing in my garden. It feels again like new things are happening, even outside of my control, but now visible, embodied, and clear. It may be that in the larger context, my household is not quite yet in a season where our work is visible. But we can keep going, waiting for the day when we can see the fruits of our labor..
