Category: The Garden Journal

Planted two rows of potatoes yesterday–a red potato and a Yukon gold. It was a little wet, but we had cut the seed potatoes on Saturday and wanted to get them in the ground before it rained.

Early February. We are ordering seeds today. Last weekend, I think it was, or maybe a couple of weekends ago (winter is such a dreamlike season), we assembled the rack we use to start seeds. Six feet high and four feet wide, it has three shelves, each with a row of grow lights. If we wanted to, we could start enough seeds on that rack to feed a small village.

And there lies the seed of the first of our annual gardening disagreements.

I want to plant a lot.

Vanessa wants to plant enough.

We’ve been together long enough and planted enough gardens, now, that this is not a blow-out-screaming-in-the-middle-of-the-potato-sprouts sort of argument. It’s more like an “Oh, really? That’s what you want?” sort of disagreement.

Take tomatoes, for example. I like to put in between thirty and forty plants, of at least half a dozen varieties. Some heirlooms for slicing, some plum varieties for canning and sauces, some sweet cherry or grape tomatoes, and some funky-looking, multi-colored ones, which seldom turn out to be as colorful, as tasty, or as plentiful as they look in the pictures.

Vanessa likes to put in a dozen tomato plants, maybe fourteen.

“Oh, really?” I say. “Which fourteen do you want?”

She looks at me. She knows my game. “If you want to put out more plants, go ahead,” she says. “You’ve got to take care of them.” Her look completes the argument: But you won’t.

She’s right. I like to plant more than I can tend in June, and certainly more than I can preserve in July and August. In summer, I’m easily overwhelmed by the enthusiasm I had for gardening in February and March. When we are planning the garden, we are not also mowing five acres, bush hogging another five, weed-eating two or three hours a week, picking berries, dragging gravel back onto the driveway after every passing thunderstorm, painting the parts of the house and outbuildings that still need paint, or trying to keep algae from strangling the pond.

From my perspective, however, planting a tomato doesn’t automatically lead to a moral obligation. Whereas, I think it does for Vanessa. She seems to feel it in a way that I don’t when a tomato goes bad on the vine, when a pepper gets sun scald, or when the squash bugs overwhelm a nearly ripe zucchini. Growing food and not eating it, preserving it, or giving it away bothers her in a very real way.

I like the garden to be lush, almost like a jungle. What bothers me is to see a patch of ground wanting a pepper or an eggplant, or to imagine one.

Therein lies the heart of most of our disagreements. For me, life is a series of plantings, and the main rule is to put in way more than will ever take hold. For her, life is about using what’s there, and the main rule is to waste not.  I don’t think either view is necessarily better than the other.

We usually end up in a compromise, about two dozen tomato plants, more than enough to eat, cook, can, and give away.