Yesterday, I met Steve Greene, a Merriam, Kansas resident who has a dream of creating an acre of organic garden.  He’s made a good start, with about 30% of his childhood backyard filled with raised beds holding every conceivable vegetable.  His eyes shine with the vibrant dream that he pursues.  He told me about his daughter’s take on the project, which ranged from, “Oh, yeah, Dad, that will never happen,” a year ago, to “I had no idea how cool it would be!”, this past month.

I bought a bag of vegetables from him and ate well last night.

On a shelf in my home sits a toy car, rusted and aging.  Beside it, a simple wooden block rests. My mother found these souvenirs of my older brothers’ childhoods while digging her own organic garden, a decade-long project on which she spent her maternal urgings after her last child had left for the last time.  She wrote about her discoveries in an article published in “Organic Gardening”, a copy of which I have — somewhere, in a folder, in a drawer, in this house.

I confine my gardening to pots on the porch.  But I get my fingernails just as dirty.  I’m a clumsy gardener though.  I’ve lost one gardening glove and I forgot to clean the trowel.  My basil thrives beside a healthy rosemary plant, but the sage fades.  I have taken it inside, thinking it might dislike the heat.  I don’t know; it looks anemic.  I still have blooming impatiens, though; and I’ve moved the begonias around to keep them from frying in the late summer sun.

I roasted some carrots last evening, carrots from Greene’s Acre Organic Gardens.  I threw them in a cast iron pan with a couple of chopped new potatoes from the grocery store.  Thirty minutes on 450 brought out the sweetness of the carrots which hours before had been pulled from the fertile ground by Steve Greene, while I sat on a hay bale and watched.

I’m a city girl; my potted plants give the illusion of earthiness, but I’m at home on the porch whereas I stumble on uneven farm ground.  But I felt the spirit of the land rise around me, out there in Merriam, and something of the gardener imprinted on my genes unfurled.  Today the alarm clock rang at five.  I pulled myself from bed and started the coffee, the sounds of NPR filling the room and the thump of the dog’s tail on the back door punctuating the morning’s rhythm.  While the coffee brewed, I stood and gazed at the little rusted car, pulled from our backyard by my mother’s spade, fifty years ago.  Then the coffee pot chimed; and I turned away, to pour a cup of coffee and start my city girl’s day.

 

POST SCRIPT:

For Pat Reynold’s benefit, I’m adding a photo that I shot at the Gardens yesterday.  Nothing buggy or deficient about these veggies!  Delicious and lovely.