The Garden

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Mark
(Posted Augsut 24, 2010)
I’m a northern Minnesota boy. Sitting on a plastic gardener’s bench in the middle of towering cornstalks pulling weeds in eighty-five degree heat isn’t my natural environment. But as long as my wife, my sons, and I have lived on the banks of the Cloquet River, we’ve had a vegetable garden.
Of course, when we moved into the old Sears and Roebuck farmhouse upriver, our first home in Fredenberg Township, the first gardens we planted were large: We included virtually anything and everything that can be grown in northeastern Minnesota. Sometimes we experimented with exotics, like sweet potatoes, baby watermelons, and cantaloupes, which, while fun when they thrived (maybe one out of every ten years) were really a waste of time and space. The more common, the mundane, including peas, wax beans, green beans, radishes, and a host of other edible vegetables; they too crowded those original garden plots, screaming for weeding and attention. But it was too much. The time, between summer hockey, soccer, vacation, work and church, was too short.The first thing to go was the strawberry bed. Too much work for too little reward. Then the vegetable plot itself lost a third of its original, ambitious girth. And when we moved into our new place downriver from the old farmhouse, the size of the vegetable garden shrunk yet again. 

So here I am, spending part of my vacation, huddled beneath the deathly still stalks, my hands stained brown from the sandy loam that makes up the soil in these parts, a high sun overhead, sweat beading across my bare back and neck, Snow Patrol tunes blasting my ears from the Sansa player hooked to the belt of my shorts, pulling enormous weeds, weeds that have had weeks of head start as I hawked books across the northland, wondering if I’ll ever learn. Ever come to realize that a day is twenty-four hours, of which, at the very least, I need to spend seven or eight hours asleep, recharging my internal batteries.

It’s a day long penance, this weeding of the neglected garden. And then there are the black raspberry canes to be trimmed. My favorite crop from the garden, those black raspberry. This summer, for whatever reason, the berries didn’t come. The past two years,  there’ve been enough sweet berries from the canes for Rene’ to put up jam. This year, we’ve had a bumper crop of the garden variety red raspberries; so many that neighbors stopped over and picked gallons after my wife and I picked what we needed. But the black ones? Not so good.

No preserves this year, I lament as I hack away at the dead stalks and braid new twine to hold the green shoots off the dusty ground. That’s a shame.

My disappointment over the black raspberries is mollified by the fact that our sweet corn, two varieties, is in silk and ready to eat. Potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and onions are also ready. The melons, pumpkins, squash, and zucchini are progressing. Only God knows whether they’ll come to fruition in time for the harvest sale in early October at our church, when we donate those crops to raise funds for Sunday school.

Six hours under a brutal sun spent bending and pulling, hacking and raking, and finally, tilling the loamy soil, and the garden is fit for a photo spread in Good Housekeeping. On the rear porch of our house, I slip into my swimsuit and massage my weary leg and back muscles with stiff fingers before heading to the river, where cold, near-autumnal water, awaits.

Sunday evening. I mix fresh tomatoes from the garden into a tossed salad and boil up ears of new corn. They are wonderful.

Peace.

Mark

About Mark

I'm a reformed lawyer and author.
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