Toughsledding

POCATELLO — Recently, I’ve had the privilege of touring a couple of local gardens.
One was perfection, neat rows, completely weedless, and the plants tall and healthy.
Corn, not quite as high as an elephant’s eye, bobbed happily in the Southeast Idaho afternoon gale; individual heads of red and green lettuce had just reached reached their peak; several varieties of onions pushed the earth aside with their exuberant growth, and peas bloomed profusely as they climbed harmonious lattice work.
Squash and melon plants emerged from their black plastic mulch with every hope of bearing fruit before summer’s end, and the gardener himself beamed with full confidence.
I was enchanted, so much so, that the experience has challenged my entire concept of gardening.
Why do I do it?
My tiny backyard plot pales in comparison. It’s overcrowded, full of quackgrass and weeds. I allow volunteer plants to further crowd those already crowded because I’m too curious to pull them.
A certain level of vermin always attack some of my plants every season, while none appeared to have devoured any of the plants on my garden tour.
My lettuce, in comparison, although planted early, was just beginning to be harvestable, and my onions were as thin as pencils. And although half of my zucchini plants survived an infestation of slugs, I will be overwhelmed with joy if I get to harvest a few.
I’ve yet to experience the abundance of zucchini that causes people to lock their cars during harvest season lest gardeners fill up the backseats with “gifts” of the lusty fruit.
Other people’s tomato plants are loaded with green tomatoes by mid-end of June, while mine are blooming, but no fruit is setting on. The plants are wind pollinated, the book says, and there has been plenty of wind sailing through my garden. What’s the problem?
Last fall I toured the Franciscan Sisters’ garden during their harvest festival. Their tomato plants were amazing, beyond anything I’ve ever seen: thick lovely stems on the plants and a plethora of huge Roma-style fruits hanging like giant clusters of grapes, each fruit the size of baseballs in all stages of ripeness.
I’ve not recovered from the experience.
It appears that what each of these gardens has that mine hasn’t is full sun. Being in the city, sunlight is limited by neighboring trees and buildings. In fact, some of my plants literally grow sideways in a fruitless effort to reach full sun and become leggy in the process.
I guess I could sell my little westside hovel and search for a better location, but these past 8 years I’ve put down some rather solid roots, literally and metaphorically, in the neighborhood.
And some plants are quite successful; for instance, my grapes are lush and prolific; their presence fulfills a long-standing dream. My pleached apple arbor is just now becoming what I envisioned after seeing an example in a garden magazine.
Vines are beginning to cover my house and fences, fulfilling another longing after years of living on a high prairie where none of these things would grow, where I had to content myself with growing 100 short-season cabbages and onions so strong in flavor it was difficult to eat them raw.
On the prairie, a crab apple tree I planted when my daughter was born, finally bore one tiny apple the year we left the ranch when my daughter was 13, and then a wind storm whipped the tree about until it split the trunk vertically.
Another Pocatello acquaintance didn’t plant his garden until mid-June with every confidence that his plants will mature.
Perhaps I jump the gun too early every year, anxious after a winter’s confinement to see green, harvest fresh herbs to fuel a soup or chicken fricassee, eat that first heaping bowl of wilted lettuce.
Afterall, there are only so many gardens possible in a lifetime, and now that I’ve reached my 59th year hobbling about on a bad hip with a cane, I’m wondering just how many gardens the cosmos will continue to grant me.