Beech Tree News Network

I’m a big fan of the spring.  Everything feels new again.  My husband Garey and I spend a lot of time outdoors during this season.  We plant seeds in pots and start working our garden plot to get it ready for the plants to come.  We have tomato plants growing all over our sunroom.  The pots are on shelves, in the floor and on top of boxes of our granddaughters discarded toys.  It’s a wonderful sight.  We actually went to the trouble of setting up one of those small greenhouses earlier in the year.  We worked on it all one Saturday.  That night a mighty wind came swooping down and took it to another land.  It is no more.   

Losing something like the greenhouse is just a small setback to people like Garey and me.  We push ever forward, always believing we can grow and maintain way more than we could possibly grow and maintain.  Some of our epic arguments have happened right smack dab in the middle of our garden, and they usually happened because we were overwhelmed, frustrated and exhausted.  You’d think we’d learn.  We haven’t.  We still plant way more than any two people could possibly maintain.  We have learned, however, to let go of the task when we become overwhelmed, frustrated and exhausted, and we no longer have epic battles in the garden.  

Garey has sweet potatoes sprouting in a make-shift contraption on our back deck.  He cut a plastic barrel in half, length-wise, and made a plant bed in one half and kept the other half partially attached so he could fold it back over the plants in the event of frost.  I like that about Garey.  He has never been a “this is the way I’ve always done it” person.  This winter, Sam and Ruth Drake told him about their success with growing tomatoes in square bales of hay.  We now have eight bales of hay, at various locations around our yard, sprouting Jet Star and Goliath tomatoes.

It’s important to us to include vegetables our children are fond of in our garden, and we say things to each other like, “Don’t forget the spaghetti squash, Natalie wants that this year.  And Scott likes green peas and lima beans, so we need some of those also.”  Even though we never know when we’ll get to see Nikki and Thomas in Louisiana, we put out zucchini and extra corn that just might be ready when we go to visit them.  Garey passed on his love of the garden to both of our girls.  Natalie’s husband, Scott, is helping Garey plant this year.  Nikki’s husband, Thomas, sent us some pictures of their small garden in the back yard.  

“Your daughter started every bit of this from seeds!” Thomas texted.

“The tomato didn’t fall far from the vine,” Garey texted back.

Last summer, Garey taught our granddaughter, Sabria, how to set out sweet potato slips and how to hoe around tomatoes.  I took a picture of them working together.  It is one of my favorites.  I had my friend, Gail Smrtic, turn the photo into a painting.  I gave it to Garey for Christmas this past December.  It pleased him more than any gift I’ve ever given him.  Most of us hope that some part of us will live on in our children.  I believe Garey’s love of a garden will live on in ours.