The Gardening Virus
No matter how it goes, well or poorly, you’ll never forget your first real foray into gardening.
The first time I ever planted anything, which I don’t count as real gardening – was back when I lived in downtown Toronto. The gardening experience was nothing more than laying a flat of sod over a postage stamp backyard. If memory serves it was 13 feet wide by 25 deep.
The sod, died. I gave up trying to grow anything.
Years later, after moving to the country and being sure that I should do something with all this land, I decided to plant a vegetable garden. I poured over the seed catalogs, magazines on country gardens, and books growing your own food. I eventually settled on growing some heirloom tomatoes and beans, plus the standard lettuce, carrots, pumpkins and potatoes. And herbs. Just because it is my passion to cook with them.
As our season is very short I started my tomatoes and beans indoors about a month ahead.
They took off like wildfire. I had trouble keeping up to watering them and finding room for the beans to grow up something, anything.
Then, May 24th rolled around. A big day in Canada, a big day in the United States. I knew from reading all my magazines and listening to gardening friends over the years that this was the ’safe planting’ weekend.
And perhaps it was safe, in Toronto and Boston, but it sure wasn’t safe in northern Ontario.
On the night of June 8 frost hit. It took all my lovely little heirloom tomato plants down. I was heartbroken. These were the babies that I had so carefully planned and cared for.
I ended up planting the rest of my garden that year and did quite well – all except for tomatos – even though I wanted to quit. I felt the land and the weather here had beaten me. I was still content to buy my groceries in town, just like everyone else seemed to do, and give up growing my own food.
But by the middle of the next winter, when the seed catalogs came again, the gardening virus hit me and I have been planting every year since. I just learned to get a little bit better at listening to the weather until the end of June.
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