How Does Your Garden Grow?

slowly slowly slowly

It’s gardening season here in Tennessee. In many ways I’ve been waiting for this since the day we decided to move. I’ve been planning and replanning my garden since May 3rd of last year, the day before we closed on our house.

I’ve had dreams of tomatoes, beans, cucumbers and flowers growing in garden that I check on every day. This desire sprang out of seemingly nowhere for me.

At the height of the pandemic, before I ever got into cooking and before I even knew my time in Austin was coming to an end, I would meditate on somewhere peaceful, far away from the world that was falling apart around us. My friend Morgan told me about meditating on place, and so I did to escape. I’d walk the streets of Paris, revisiting the bakeries near the hotel I stayed at when I went for the first (and only time). I’d rifle through the bookstore selecting a James Joyce novel written in residence at the store, while I waited on a veggie sandwich and a cappuccino from the kitchen. I’d cry in front of Notre Dame.

I did this with a lot of trips and a lot of peaceful moments during the pandemic. I needed to escape but I couldn’t, so the best I could I’d paint pictures in my mind.

One day, while I was laying in the sun and beginning to sweat, I started to walk through a garden. The garden itself wasn’t big, but there were so many plants and so many things growing. There were big, deep red sunflowers heavy with bees and seeds. There were cucumbers climbing trellises, and tomatoes that looked like orange bubbles, waiting to be snacked on.

I’d never been to this garden in real life. I’d never had any interest in gardening before I started to escape there during meditations in 2020.

When we decided to pursue buying a house, the garden in my mind's eye was a huge selling point. I wanted land I could plant on. I wanted to watch things grow.

A big part of the adjustment of moving here has been the change of pace. It’s my favorite thing about it so far. I feel like I have time to watch time pass here. I can watch things grow in my garden. I can show up everyday and pick bugs off of leaves, apologizing to them before I squish them between my index finger and my thumb. As of today all the seeds (sans a few experiments) are in the ground for our summer garden.

A trellis salvaged from inside the house is hung to support our squash. When the cucumbers and zucchini get tall enough, we’ll trellis them too.

Half of my tomato plants died, and the other half are growing like weeds, already at the second rung of their staking.

Last night I made Corn and Basil Cacio e Pepe with almost three cups of basil and our plants look unfazed.

With any luck I will have a summer garden full of abundance.

That feels significant. 

Moving was difficult. There are no two ways around it. Picking my life up at 30, changing scenery to be closer to home, and attempting to slow down was not as easy as I thought it might be. 

It’s brought up a lot of stuff, which in retrospect I could have predicted. 

But I am here, approaching an entire year in. 

Every day my house looks a little different, my garden looks a little different, I look a little different. 

For a while this change scared me. It made me anxious and it made me feel weird, but now I understand it’s the same as it’s always been. I’m just making time and space to watch it happen. I’m in an observer’s seat while I’m also continuing down the path of life.

When I was talking to my dear friend Jon about moving, I told him I wanted it all. 

I wanted dirt underneath my fingernails, and I wanted to be photographing campaigns for killer brands. I wanted to go to the Grammys and I wanted to cook zucchini from my garden. I wanted to renovate a modern home, while preserving some of the life the house lived before us. 

I still want it all, and as this garden grows I feel myself getting it.

Links:

• I sat down to write this letter because my friend Mary reminded me through her dedication to showing up, that I could do this. Please read her newsletter, Strange Horses, and become a subscriber.

  

• Currently Reading: Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford
  Up Next: My Pleasure by Laura Delarato
  Just Ordered: In Pursuit of Flavor by Edna Lewis

• Speaking of cooking, I decided to finally reward my cooking journey with the Fully Baked set by Great Jones. I do have an affiliate link with them if you want to shop, and they’re currently doing a Memorial Day Weekend sale for 25% off everything with the code MDW25. Shop here!

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