It was the full-colour catalogue that did me in. Page after page of luscious fruits and vegetables, dripping with dew and ready to be harvested. Like many first-time gardeners, I had visions of a cornucopia of fresh organic produce: heirloom tomatoes nestled against European lettuce varietals, strawberries still warm from the sun.
Foolish? Perhaps. In my own defence, I had recently moved back to Vancouver after more than a decade of living in New York and was embracing the great green space that is the lower mainland of British Columbia. When a spot was made available in a community garden, I leapt at the opportunity to introduce my daughter to the experience of growing our own food, certain that we would spend happy afternoons in the dirt, learning about the ecosystem and eating fresh vegetables. Would it involve work? Of course it would. But we were ready.
When I say “we,” of course, I mean me. My daughter is not quite 3 and so her participation in the garden is neither voluntary nor participation. Woody Allen once said, “Eighty per cent of success is just showing up.” No one better embodies that philosophy than a toddler. But I had my hopes of winning a gardening-parenting-teaching trifecta, and so, armed with an array of organic, West Coast-friendly seeds, I was ready to recreate Eden for my little girl.
I had planned a roster of vegetable all-stars: green beans, snow peas, lettuce, tomatoes and carrots. Carrots, I felt, were the perfect garden vegetable for kids. Easy to grow, fun to eat straight from the ground.
Easy. Fun.
I was so naive.
As all gardeners know, growing anything successfully involves both luck and skill, and I had neither. A cold, wet spring became a cold, wet summer. Nothing to be done about that, I sighed, disappointed but not defeated. No sign of the sun. No sign of the carrots.
As the weeks went by, the neighbouring garden plots began to produce waves of snow peas, lettuce and – yes – carrots. I looked at the pale green tops sagging over the dirt in our garden bed. Could they be ready? I decided to jump in, uprooting the largest one I could see.
“Look,” I said triumphantly. “A carrot!”
My daughter raised her eyebrow at me, clearly shuffling through her mental dictionary of words learned. Carrot. Orange. Long. Crunchy. Nope, her look suggested, you can’t fool me. What I held in my hand looked like nothing so much as a disconsolate parsnip – pale, stunted and ashamed. It was as though the thing had exited the earth with a sigh of “Why bother?” This was a question I was beginning to ask myself.
My mother, an experienced gardener, offered a box of all-purpose plant food that promised nothing short of vegetable rapture. Days passed, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it, knowing that with a few sprinkles, my organic dreams would be dashed. What if my fellow veggie growers found out? Surely I would be excommunicated from the community garden.
“What’s so unnatural about it?” my mother asked over the phone while I suspiciously eyed the sparkling blue powder. “Give it 10 days and your vegetables will pop!”
My garden thriving? You couldn’t get more unnatural than that.
Another week of flaccid, bug-sampled vegetables and I gave in, desperate to grow just one decent carrot. I found myself in the garden after dark, flashlight in hand, kneeling in the cold, damp dirt. I cast a nervous glance over my shoulder then poured the contraband fertilizer over my plants. So this is what it has come to, I thought to myself, flicking fat slugs off the leaves of my green beans. The things we do for our kids.
But on the walk home, I reconsidered. Exactly who was this garden for?
This wasn’t just about providing food for my daughter to eat – it was a tangle of high-minded ideals and hopeless delusions, like much of the good intentions of parenthood. I wanted our gardening together to teach her the values of patience and hard work, and the importance of local food, but I was also seduced by the image of myself in her eyes, years down the road. Parenthood is a balance of looking forward and back at the same time, each decision made with a thought to the actions and consequences to come. I wanted my daughter to reminisce fondly on our time together in the garden.
We define our responsibilities as parents based on many things – social or cultural standards, what our own parents did (or didn’t do), but mostly how we want to see ourselves. The space between the parent you want to be and the parent you are can be minute in fact but enormous in feeling, and the more you strive, the more you can suffer; there is no finish line in a contest against yourself. In my eagerness to succeed, I didn’t see that it was me who had something to learn. It’s a fool’s errand to attempt to force memories. They should happen, well, organically.
So I’ve made my peace with our carrot-less existence, content instead to buy our vegetables from the grocery store and let my daughter dig in the bare dirt. I’m humbled but not broken, ready to watch fall roll up the end of our gardening experiment.
But next summer? I’m planting lowered expectations and hoping for better weather. Those slugs better watch out.
Jessica Starr lives in Vancouver.
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