My public garden

If you ever want to feel part of the community, just grow a garden. Your neighbors will come by, lean on your fence and correct your mistakes.

I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence when I turned over a 10 ft. x 10 ft. patch of ground in the backyard for my first vegetable garden. Up until that point in my life, I had looked at gardening as a cult activity practiced by people who understood the secrets and rhythms of nature. The gardeners I knew best were on PBS showing off elaborate landscapes. I guess I put gardening in the same category as pole vaulting, one of life’s experiences that I would forego.

I broke ground for a garden because a full-page ad in the back of a magazine promised I could grow a “postage stamp” garden and harvest an abundance of produce. Starting small sounded right for a beginner, so I sent for the kit. Back came instructions, seeds, peat pots and a tray and lid to shelter seedlings.

Cautious and skeptical, I sowed the seeds and dutifully watered the seedlings. To my delight, after two months I had 2-in-tall tomato, pepper, cauliflower and broccoli plants. The seedlings gave me hope. Maybe gardening was not an impossibility.

But gardening became more daunting when I turned over the soil, planted the seedlings, and discovered that my neighborhood was full of part-time urban farmers ready with information and instruction--like those TV gardeners, but not as easily turned off. With a corner lot and a garden parallel to the sidewalk, I became the target of curious passersby who wanted to know why I was planting things so close together when their nearest and dearest, and they themselves always spaced plants to allow for maximum growing room. “It’s a postage stamp garden” I explained feebly. I heard myself quoting directly from the instructions: “You don’t actually need a lot of space to grow things. Besides, it cuts down on weeding.” The kibitzers nodded politely and with pity---gentle behavior compared to what was to come.

Two elderly ladies who took a daily walk past my house stopped one early evening to watch me as I staked my sagging tomato plants. One of them pointed at me and confided loudly to her companion, “This is the one I was telling you about. She’s trying to grow carrots as close as the hairs on your head.”

“I just need to thin them a little,” I said. They looked at each other, smirked, and walked on. Never had the words privacy fence held more meaning.

The man next door was more concerned with my watering habits. When I went for the sprinkler, he often looked up at the heavens and asked if I was going to water right then. “We’re in for a big rainstorm,” he would say. It’s true the skies were usually threatening, but summer clouds can pass by without dropping rain. I would shrug my shoulders and water anyway, while my neighbor sat in his lawn chair, staring at me as though I had lost my mind. Sometimes it rained.

It took me awhile to become insensitive to public censure about my gardening methods. In the beginning, I skulked in the house, looking out through the blinds to make sure that the area was vacant of master gardeners. Then I would sneak out of my own home to do the willy-nilly watering and weeding. But gardening by stealth was not very enjoyable, and eventually I decided to take charge. I would use some of their advice and ignore the rest.

My new attitude, however, did not stop the flow of horticultural wisdom, I got free advice on everything to do with gardening. The people across the street even told me that I’d put my garden in the wrong location. It should have been at the back of the yard, in the sunny spot.

Happily, there were beautiful surprises in that first garden: finding the first cucumbers half-hidden under deep, green leaves, slicing the first sun-warmed tomato, the songs of the birds, the early morning light. Best of all, I learned that nature played no favorites, and was forgiving even to stubborn, clumsy amateurs. In the end, the locals had to admit that I got quite a bit from little space, considering I had “everything all crammed in there like that.”

Today, I am a seasoned, if still somewhat slapdash gardener. Every year, I put in at least four “Big Boy’ or “Better Boy” tomatoes and can’t imagine how I lived through the years of mealy, store-bought imposters. I learned that the people across the street were right and moved my garden to the back where they said it should be. It has grown along with my trust in time and process.

Now I wonder if there is some new gardener down the block or up the street who would benefit from all my wisdom.