The Constant Gardener

Life began in a garden.

Probably was in the Pacific Northwest, because apples certainly did well there. My present garden is also in the northwest - the northwest corner of an intersection of two streets in the town where I live.

There the analogy abruptly ends (sigh).

Anyway, after I moved from the Pacific Northwest not too long ago, I started a garden. I did this because I grew up in the wonderfully garden-friendly town of Crowley, Louisiana, or zone 9, for you zone-obsessed folks.

I carefully went about establishing my garden in the finest tradition of nilly-willy gardeners everywhere. I was ferociously efficient. I spent only, say, five minutes deciding to locate five east-west running rows that were 15 feet long by two feet wide.

The ends of the rows abutted a small bush-and-tree line to the west and my home to the east. How proud I was of that placement - using up most of my tiny backyard with a "productive plants" design ! And how dumb I was to locate the rows where the house blocked the sun in the morning and the line of trees shaded it in the afternoon !

In the completely barren front yard, I created a bed running north and south that was four feet wide and 20 feet long right in front of the east-facing picture window. Pretty soon, I figured, I would looking out upon amber waves of grain - or something like that - each and every day.

Now my front yard, I found out, had been used for 13 years as prime real estate - for parking broken-down cars. The back yard suffered no such abuse, as it was obviously the primary source for excavating the finest blackjack clay in a three-state region (no brag- just fact).

So my gardening adventure was a wonderful challenge and opportunity right from the "git-go," as old- khaki- pants- stuffed- in- the- tops- of- white- boots gardeners everywhere will appreciate.

First thing I did was amend the soil, because my soil's constitution demanded it. This was not easy, because - as with the United States Constitution - amending something so firmly entrenched is a slow process that takes years. I did not know this.

Merrily I hoed the blackjack rows in the backyard while adding, say, a few dozen shovels full of dirt transferred from a front-yard pile delivered 10 years ago to the owner of the home (and my landlord).

"Sold to me as topsoil . . . " the owner bragged to me, when describing the dirt. He neglected to finish that sentence as " . . . for a nuclear waste facility I had planned."

What it amounted to was hardpan clay that Crowley's rice farmers would kill for, to use either at the bottom of their flooded fields or as a liner base for their backyard swimming pools.

After hoeing this amalgam of clays into submission over two weeks of lumbar-shredding work, I planted myself in a recliner and grew tipsy, imbibing a favorite beverage and dreaming of plants in the Jack- in- a- beanstalk category.

Be careful - as my English teacher would say - for what you wish.

I soon reaped all of the horrifying results that Jack achieved without any of the fun (or golden egg- laying geese). Giants (swamp mosquitoes) chased me, women (neighbor ladies) yapped at me, and I was - for a time - trapped in an oven, or so it seemed (August in Louisiana can get hot like that).

Anyway - despite the lack of good soil, despite my over or under watering, despite no fertilizer of any kind, despite the bugs, despite the meager 4-6 hours of sunlight a day, these gardens actually produced stuff !

These caretaker-challenged gardens triumphed over their creator's (me) lack of intelligent design and gave me spinach, dill, parsley, basil, cucumbers, cantaloupes, pumpkins, tomatoes, bell peppers, giant sunflowers, sage, birdhouse gourds, and jalapeno peppers.

On the ornamental side, they gave me brilliant red fairy trumpets, creamy white roses, sky blue, white, periwinkle, and purple morning glories, yellow calendula, blue flax, snowy white achillea, red/ orange/ yellow daisies, purplish bluebonnets, cerulean bachelor buttons, lavender lavender, and did i mention a giant sunflower that was 12 feet tall and had a head that was more than a foot across !?

If this is not evidence of evolution interacting with the life force, I am a monkey's uncle !

But that bombardment of braggadocio in the preceding paragraphs does not the whole story tell. I learned a heck of a lot about what to do next year because most of my garden would have been adjudged an abject failure had you compared it to an LSU Master Gardener's blue-ribbon winning efforts !

Where I over watered, mold grew. Where I planted too closely, plantswerecrowded and produced stunted fruit. Where I did not water enough, plants wilted. Where I didn't break up the clay deep enough and prepared a more shallow bed, plants toppled over.

Where the sun did not shine long enough, plants were small. Where I did not build up a raised bed, plants drowned. Where I did not mix in lots of organic material, fruit was pygmy-sized.

But all of these hard lessons learned did not my enthusiasm lessen. When and where I succeeded with my gardening effort, I was as proud as a papa could be about my foot-long cucumbers; baseball-sized bell peppers; juicy, tasty tomatoes; shot-put sized, juicy and sweet cantaloupes; birdhouse -to -be gourd; seven -foot tall and two -foot wide monster dill; 30 -inch tall basil; bushy big sage; frilly, full parsley; blue-green, bold broccoli, screaming orange, basketball-sized pumpkins, and did i mention that flagpole - sized giant sunflower ?

Life, as they say, began in a garden. My life was renewed there.