life lessons from the garden (grow, dammit!)
I worked in the garden yesterday. I love to work in the garden.
I often think of my grandmother, Mama (pronounced Mam- Ma) also known as Tianna (Tia Anna or Aunt Ann), whose house, and garden, this once was. Someone told her that it was good to talk to your plants. She answered, I do talk to my plants everyday. I say to them, “Grow, dammit!”
Yesterday, while working in the garden I found myself pondering. It’s been 15 years now that I’ve been living here in Baja full time. For the first five or so years I was still traveling literally around the world and so I wasn’t able to dedicate much time to things like working in the garden. In those first years the ‘gardening’ often meant hours spent with a pick ax, trying to remove the giant rocks that appeared every time I tried to plant a new fruit tree. Then there were the loads of manure, delivered by guys, friends of mine, who looked at me like I was a bit crazy for being so excited about poop. There have been layer upon layer of ‘yard trash’ - any organic material I could get my hands on, often scavenging neighbor’s trash piles for bags of leaves or other trimmings. Pretty early on I also installed rain gutters and water tanks, 3 of them, at 1000 liters each, simply to collect the rain water and be able to use it in the garden. And, when I finally installed a washer and drier in the house (my grandma had always taken her laundry to San Diego to get washed - which is another funny story related to a contraband bottle of tequila) I made sure to route the gray water to the fruit trees.
All that to say, it’s actually been quite a bit of work over the past decade. But as I was working in the yard I began to look around and feel like, shouldn’t a decade of all this effort have more to show for it? Shouldn’t I have made more progress by now?
Granted, my lemon and lime trees have actually begun to produce abundant fruit - after waiting about 7 years with nothing. My sapote (sort of like a cross between an apple and a pear) has also just this season, for the first time in its 8 years, begun to bear fruit. I was actually shocked when I found one that had dropped below the tree as the last thing I imagined was that it could actually be a sapote fruit.
A gardener friend, when I was mentioning this to her, said ‘looks like maybe finally all that manure is paying off!’
And there it is, of course. The life lesson hidden in plain sight. This time from the garden. All the digging, all the hard work of rocky ground, all the manure and ‘yard trash’ and composting - the years of simply continuing to invest in the garden, to trust that slowly, poco a poco, the soil would begin to benefit from it, even if the results were not immediately obvious.
And me saying ‘Grow dammit!’ Why does t it happen quicker? Why can’t transformation be immediate, like the snap of the fingers? Why does learning and growth and discovery take time?
But here it is, more than a decade in, and delightfully, surprisingly, things are bearing fruit.
