Gardening…

By: Mary Lu Scholl

First let me explain, I was a city kid.

From the time I met my husband, all he ever talked about was Florida.  So one day I told him.  “Go to Florida.  Call me.”  (This was before cell phones.)  Naturally he left – on my birthday, thank you very much.  My picture of Florida was Flamingos, alligators, rain forest, beaches…

He stopped here in Crystal River – so I did get alligators.

My dad taught me to garden.  You wait until spring, spring in Colorado is May.  You dig up nice, neat rows and plant certain vegetables.  I arrived here on January first.  No one told me that spring here was in February.  In between work, I kept an eye on my neighbor.  While I was waiting for spring, he planted, grew, and harvested two gardens.  I was already two steps behind, and just a little stubborn, so I waited for May.  While I waited, I decided to get the garden ready.  I started digging, looking for the rich black dirt I was accustomed to.  The first thing I found was cactus – in Florida?  Arizona, yes.  Florida?  The second thing I found out was that Florida doesn’t do dirt.  It’s sand.  It was good exercise, digging up and turning my sand.  I raked it out smooth (my husband pointed out it was smoother before I started).

I drew little schematics for what to plant where.  There were corn, peas, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.  Squash in the corner.  When I actually started planting, I deviated somewhat from my plan because the directions on the package and the amount of each seed mitigated my plans. 

Meanwhile, my neighbor had planted his again, two weeks earlier.

I watered and watered.  Every day I came home from work and watered.  The weeds grew.  At least I thought they were weeds.

My neighbor’s plants came up and waved their little tendrils at me.  I watered.  Grass grew.

His were now a foot tall and mind had not come up yet.  My dad had a compost pile.  My neighbor had what looked like a paint sprayer on his hose the spit out blue water.  How important could that be, anyway?

There’s a reason my mother didn’t name me Mary Patience.

One bright Saturday morning I went out there with my shovel and dug everything up to start over.  There were a few suspected vegetables, but by that time I had no idea what was growing where, and it had been so long since I had a garden, I wouldn’t recognize a zucchini if it tripped me.  I replanted and even cheated with a few plants from the garden store.  I groveled to the garden guy to get advice and was sent home with bags of foul-smelling dirt to add to my sand.  This time I stuck to my little schematic.  I wrote on plastic spoons what each row was and planted them at the start of each one. 

The more I watered, the faster the ink ran off the spoons.  But, this time, things started coming up.  Problem was, all those seeds I planted the first time, came up, too.  You got it, beans in the corn, tomatoes among the peas, and lettuce sprinkled with carrots and radishes.  There were squash and cucumbers were growing up the fence.

I was now growing a mixed salad.