Six Inches of Topsoil

 

My bedroom window overlooks the garden, so my first view every morning (other than the smiling faces of the dogs) is of the progress of the plants.

We planted just over a week ago, just before a big rain.  Four rows of beans, 2 rows of peas and 10 or 12 rows of corn, along with tomato, squash, pepper and okra plants.  We always plant more than we need.  Something happens to gardeners when they visit a nursery or open a seed catalog.  Even passing by the seed department at the Dollar General is impossible without stopping to look.  It’s as if a force field reaches out and says, “buy me, buy me, buy me.”   I’ve witnessed people in spring at the greenhouse load up a horse trailer with tomato plants and I once had a friend who planted 4 rows of squash plants.  I’m not sure, but I think that right there would be grounds for appointment of a guardian.  I’m sure people had to lock their cars when he was around.  He said he didn’t even like squash all that much; he just liked to give it away.

I wish everyone could have a garden.  Or at least work in one.  It would give a new appreciation for our food supply and for the earth and our environment.  Paul Harvey once said, “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”  I would add another phrase to Mr. Harvey’s profound statement and that would be the fact that bees exist.  That’s a fragile system, when you stop to think about it, especially with several billion mouths to feed.  I remember a year when we didn’t see any bees around the garden.  Usually they appear in the spring, buzzing from plant to plant, harvesting and at the same time carrying pollen from plant to plant.  The year we had few bees was the year we had very little squash and okra.  The plants bloomed, but without pollination, they didn’t develop fruit.  I always am happy and relieved to see honey bees appear.  Can you imagine if we had to hand pollinate everything? 

Gardening is all about hope, something we desperately need in these times.  The seeds that come in the colorful packages don’t look like much of anything when you open them up.  How on earth can little dried up things like tomato seeds grow up to produce a big juicy tomato?  How can tiny cabbage seeds, hardly larger than grains of sand, make a head of cabbage as big as a human head?  Don’t even get me started about walnuts producing walnut trees or apple seeds growing into something as large as a tree!

 It never ceases to amaze me, even after 60 plus years of observing gardens, how quickly seeds sprout and push through the dirt, reaching toward the sun.  So, less than a week later, tiny seedlings march down the rows, barely visible green against the darkness of the soil.  In just a few days, the plants will be more visible from my bedroom window and I won’t even need my glasses to see them.  From experience I know that, all too soon, an army of weeds will also be marching down the rows, and between the rows, eager to invade.  Soon enough, the garden will be blooming, then bearing its bounty and eventually when I look out my bedroom window in the mornings I will be thinking, “surely not more squash!”