Until last year, I didn’t understand the hard work that a garden requires. It takes patience, care, more patience, preventative maintenance, reactive maintenance, more patience, a little bit of bug spray, and a little bit more patience. Once you do all this, you can enjoy the fruits of your labor (bad pun intended).
It was our first attempt at a garden as we planted 3, 4 foot square boxes of yumminess and waited for its fruits. We learned a lot along the way. We learned about the Squash Vine Borer who feasted on our beautifully large squash, the cucumber, and the watermelon plants until they were no more. This year we’re picketing the invasion of such a pest…with a fence (another bad pun intended with a pinch of sarcasm). We also learned that bugs also like cabbage AND that cabbage takes up the entire box once it’s grown. I don’t even like cabbage that much anyway. The hole-y plants ended up feeding our hungry compost pile, not our appetites. We learned a ton, but what impressed this city girl most were the efforts that go into a garden and the patience that it requires to come to fruition.
FLASHBACK: 4+ Years ago. Michael was a youth pastor and had organized a mud volleyball game at a church member’s house. He owned a large area of land: some was rented out to farmers, and a small area was used to grow a stash of his own produce. This man graciously permitted the youth group the opportunity to ruin a section of one of his fields to play mud volleyball.
Enter Maren. I was driving to the mud volleyball game in the coolest car known to man. The car that made Michael the catch he was in college and was the ultimate factor that I fell in love: Michael’s 1988 two-toned blue Ford Aerostar minivan WITH A HITCH (for hauling farm wagons). THE BOEHMMOBILE. 100% Class, BA-BY!
Now, keep in mind, I’ve lived in the city my entire life and was driving this monstrosity through the suburbs of Indianapolis on my way to the volleyball game. I made it safely and with ease. Parking was limited because we were, after all, playing in a field– so I offroad-ed to the parking destination. I found the best place to park and moved into position, right over a patch of weeds. A patch of weeds that were meticulously growing in a row. Weeds that the church member had planted in hopes of later eating as STRAWBERRIES. Strawberries that I mistook for weeds.
To my humiliation, I apologized profusely. I never lived it down either. If I knew then what I know now about garden difficulties, I would have groveled at this man’s feet with apologies. I’m so thankful for his graciousness. I bet the next growing season he probably fenced out the largest pest of all–myself.
